It’s like you’re mad at me
For expecting something from you
I think
As I pace listening to the soundtrack
Of tram cars and trucks
Bike bells
From here to the Pijp is the same distance
As walking to The Little Store
A pack of kids on a mission then
To spend our every cent
On penny candy:
Airheads, smarties, the like
Ranges of sweet intelligence
Now going out to find my fate
And a matcha lemonade
Like the one I used to drink on 148
It’s crazy
The more inconsequential the relics
The more compressed a mile becomes
In Amsterdam: The Rijksmuseum, the old canals
Dilate the distance
In Medway: The middle school, the nursing home
Squeezed the space and made it small
My brain hasn’t taken a break since September
I realize
I only like the roses on the bush
In their natural state
Not chopped and grouped
As I snap pictures of sidewalk chalk
And Harry Styles posters for concerts now cancelled
I realize
We were particularly polarizing people
Who made ourselves into the punchline
This quarantine has me coming to see
I can’t amplify the negative space with anything but you
Voice notes
Fill up and stretch out time instead of texts
Kind of like how I waited
Six months for those poems to be published
Written seven months prior
About events that happened eight months before
In the midst of an eclipse season nonetheless
I remember
A smashed wine glass in the sink
Authentic diplomacy
Nervous urgency
I notice
The last time I let trickle down economics control me
Was with that thing that happened with you
Since then, I’ve refused
I wonder
If my prophecies always hurt me and
If love invokes rage, can rage invoke love
I dreamed
I was doing cartwheels in a rainbow field
And you were there lying
Asking me to stay
Maintaining something is harder than disrupting it
It’s a confused euphoria lately
I like the idea of trains
Because they force you
To go straight through the thing
Instead of over it
Like a plane
