Matt

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when I was 22

5 years ago
22 during Bush's first term
And I was trying so hard.
I was trying not to watch the men watch the dancers.
Trying to stay off the powder, trying to graduate college, trying not to vomit.
I was trying not to love a girl who loved a boy that I could not love.
It was all very painful and exciting, unplanned, chaotic.

So I watched the dancers and smoked in the back corner of the room. The students, the moms, the sisters.
The fatty, the dready, the hippie, the goth. From 18 to 48 they were all women in disrepair who shone for 5-minute intervals twice an hour
then circled with legs hoisted and teeth bare. The meat from their last kill still stuck to their gums. Spinning in the strobe, sliding up and down the clean brass pole while I schlepped Jack, & Jim to bored husbands, bankers, dealers.
Cigarettes were still legal then and the smoke swirling in the red lights was the prettiest thing in my life at the time.

All Better

When your heart breaks
and your stomach revolts
and your fire flees
because you thought your life was
was,
was
decided
and then you get the shit kicked out of you
and then he wants to torture you
because all he knows is torture and baby talk

when all that happens they tell you not to call him,
not to text him
to cry to your girls and eat ice cream
They don't tell you
that
Ben & Jerry are black men, they just don't go down.
That
your friend's were over it three years ago
that
texts send themselves
that
you will lose 15 pounds cried out in tears
that
Xanax and porn will be your only comforts
that
although all hearts break at some point
yours will hurt more than
Juliette's
Mia Farrow's
Hillary Clinton's
that through no action at all
all of your
dreams would turn nightmares
all of your
poems would go flat
all of your
smiles will be thin veils
What they don't tell you
because they've blocked it out
(and good for them)
is that the Xanax gets old and turns to drinks with strange men
who talk like adults
and aren't into self loathing
Porn gives way to late night lovers
who grab your ass and clutch your throat
and give it to you the way you think he did
when he was younger, thinner, and less beaten down by the world.

Vegas

Times get tough
the tough get moving and doing and screwing.
My soul has been set on fire
for 63 days
and although my face has healed
and my ego,
my gluttonous ego,
has had it's fill,
it's time to make a move.
Not on a man.
Not on a woman.
Not this time.

This time I will seduce an entire city.