i hooked up with a paramedic at a house party last night
crazy how we all have real person jobs now.

you could have made a richard scarry book out of the attendants
of this function.

an EMT and a lawyer and a military officer and a business
analyst all walk into a bar,

and i suppose i’m there too—
what do you do, they ask, only slavering a little—
it isn’t their fault, they’re just really desperate to find out which page i belong on.

i tell them i work in soft furnishings, and
i dream about supermarket aisles overflowing with a tsunami of oranges and
i grieve the shirts i left at peoples houses when i was a kid, and
i wonder about my baby teeth.

i’m very busy.

i write about things that happen to me like i’m not afraid,
i’ve actually been super brave about it all, considering.

you know where to find me.
i haven’t moved in the last year or so

can’t say the same for you; tho’ that might be for the better
my shoes are tracking foreign mud along this familiar path, and like,
i’m directly contributing to kauri dieback

i’ll apologise big so you can tell i mean it more.

a woman in a facebook group i’m in put her dog down.
she wrote a post saying that the sun didn’t shine that day.
how fitting. how fitting.

she wrote it twice, like that.

how fitting, how fitting.