One Consecutive Day
There’s something about a poem
in particular
that wants to slide out perfectly
smooth and long and slick
like a shit you didn’t know you needed to take
Sometimes I don’t want to feed myself
Unless I can plate up the plutonic ideal
So I starve myself a little
as a treat
An app tells me
That I’ve been feeding myself for one consecutive day
And you’ve gotta take pride in the smallest of milestones
if you want to save a life
Even after a slew of work related deaths
That 1 day without accidents has got to count for something
When I open my mac
And ride the escalator to the iCloud
I find myself in a graveyard of the semester I planned
I pass the corpses briskly, uncomfortably
Until I reach the proper grave
I pull a spade out of my back pocket,
adjust my lonely little bowtie,
and start digging
for that one article that was going to
springboard me to intellectual nirvana
A sliver of sweetness on the top of my tongue
as I remember the first steps of our dance
before I shoved you off a cliff
and hid in my sheets for 4 months
I don’t want to look at you,
so I feel around for you like a father
who can’t bring himself to see the dumpster
he’s harvesting from to feed his children
But when I touch that listless hand,
it grasps mine through the loose layer of soil
A baby corpse’s grasp
My left eye jiggles like it’s been doing
And my jaw drops, tumbling down each step of the escalator
You smile
I sheepishly reel my jaw back up
“You been practicing?”
“For one consecutive day.”
“That’s a start.”
You hold my hand the whole way down the escalator
And maybe I’ll trust myself enough to
ask you for another dance.