When you live alone,
the delivery boy looks like a
pilgrim trekking to Rome.
Palm trees are sentinels
that keep watch over unsuspecting
barbarians. When you live alone,
the books on the shelf are your
greatest allies. The ink runs out
whenever brilliance comes.
When you live alone,
you develop a real concern about haunting your
own hallways (already relishing how intimate
you’ve become with the cracks in your ceiling).
When you live alone,
Your life becomes a dance somewhere
between a disco-ball and an alarm clock
(a constant dream without an erection).
when you live alone,
the contents of your refrigerator look like a
science project. No matter how long you leave
there will be the kind of
bed that holds too many kinds of empty
to itemize;
when you live alone,
your apartment becomes a womb with keys,
and you marry the darkness.
You dream of funeral songs and a new
demographic for your life’s work;
of mourners and the kinds of skirts
they’d wear, flat as a denial,
too tight for compromise.
when the delivery boy
rings the doorbell, you wonder how he
made it past so many lines of battle. you
stammer an apology for being so sloppy and
wet, you only just got out of the shower.
You say you are sorry you aren’t a
girl or maybe that would interest him.
Also, you are sorry for telling him that.
When he leaves, you are sorry
you didn’t invite him in for tea
and biscuits, the biscuits
he’s brought in the darkness.
When you live alone,
you are sorry a lot of the time
how often each of us forgets to buy new candles.
