Thursday night
this rowdy crowd of in-betweeners
speedlines, straightlines
screeching tires curving.
We park and wait,
crank up the ghetto-nerd rap.
The revolution is here,
‘uh evolution of years.
We are children.
We still like to pretend.
Where the hell is he?
There are so many hot girls here.
It occurs to me that I think
white girls are hot. Black
girls are too…something
wrong with me.
I joke around,
say Greg has two mistresses,
say I’m a fucking fatass,
say only white people bowl.
Cord is missing, there he is
with his girlfriend, Crystal
will leave him in two months. Her car
is the color of my stumbling,
my bruises in the dark.
Sometimes
I fall
because
I deserve it.
There are too many hot girls here-
so many, there’s no room for us. So
we screech to the other end of town,
scare the shit out of Crystal,
who is bone thin because she
crashed. Like that shitty 90’s
song about mmm, mmm, mmm.
But when he finally came back
his hair had turned
from black into bright white.
A noise in my ears
these shoes are two sizes too
large for me. I want to live
on a roll of quarters,
one a game, like the Japanese do.
All they have here is DDR and
a crane game which munches
your quarters. If only I could reach
the dolphin at the bottom.
if only, if only…
Eight pounds. Eleven pounds. Fourteen.
Sixteen. An eightball on the street,
a girl I once knew, who lost
her first to an asshole. I still remember
the smell of his breath after
a fifth of Captain Morgan.
Morgan was my sixth love-crush.
I couldn’t lift her in my arms.
We never went anywhere. She sucked
a cock through an asshole.
There’s too much shit in my eyes.
Eight pounds. Eleven pounds. Thirteen.
Too many numbers.
My fingers are so small,
I can’t pick up the world.
I just want to eat cheesesticks
and laugh at people. But
I pay eleven dollars for shoes
and three games. Maybe
you’ll break fifty today.
Fuck.
I joke,
bowling is such a white game.
I’m wrong three lanes down.
Food, nachos, pizza. I’m wrong.
In Kentucky, the tree ropes won’t kill you,
clogged arteries will.
I am not actually playing but
merely distracting myself. I
miss the backswing every time.
I roll two strikes.
They come up short.
My fingers are too thin.
They call me The Sexter—
I have already cheated on you—
but in a week you will stay.
I wish you were here. I love you.
A woman alone to my left
has an outdated haircut
and she strikes more
than our five scores combined.
I would like to ask her name.
I don’t.
I give in to the temptation,
the leftover loneliness from my childhood.
Hey Greg, can I borrow some change?
Five hundred calories, sugar salt
sugar salt. It’s the missing,
the sickness, the wanting, the missing.
I miss her. I can’t keep blaming
my problems on other people.
My stomach barely escaping
belt, my arms little circles. I
am one hundred and forty five,
five foot ten. Fucking fatass.
We pretend play buddies
men in laps in men, because straight boys
always have something to prove. How long
can you last? My ball swings both ways
and no one knows. I palm
traces of false affection.
I prove myself
in the last game I steal
Greg’s final ball.
A drip drop in the gutter,
he ties for first.
He doesn’t talk
the whole way home.
The air is dead, and
we listen to obscene beats,
ambient terrors from movie soundtracks.
I dip fingers, hands, head past downed window
air fucking my ears in and out.
I scan the horizon for signs of life
and wonder: how will I know
when I see a visitor in the sky?
Red reflectors pierce my eyes,
little danger flecks on the road,
parked and stillborne.
Are we imagining our abductions?
There is so much false danger
in the sky, on the road
lights and sound, our human voices
shut tight. And the thought occurs
that if I scream, if I float,
if I shake and roll my eyes
amber brown backwards,
someone will listen.
I slip into bed.
In the distance I am shaking.
My hands wander down
and
touch.
Something is missing;
I’m not sure what
hurts.
If I sleep, I will breathe
and if I breathe, I will
know.
I’m alive.
