In Room 204 of the Lancaster Motel,
I ease myself into the bath.
Music plays. It's the kind
of pan flute and finger-picked
guitar tune you hear over fuzzed out speakers
in grocery stores. I don't know the source.
The place smells of mildew
and cheap coffee and self pleasure
and Febreeze. I'm tired.
More tired than I've ever been, I think.
Do I still have a job? Until I call in to check, I suppose.
And I suppose this pocket knife will have to do.
I never seem to have a corkscrew on hand when
my mood calls for wine. I stab and jimmy the cork
until I can pry it loose with my teeth. A few
bits of cork float on the surface of the wine.
This does not stop me, nor slow me.
Pollyanna and I stayed in 206,
a detail that calls attention to itself, a detail that
longs for a poetic phrase,
yet I feel little other than the
dull thud of coincidence.
I remember asking her
before that first time if
she thought of *** as
a form or erasure or
addition. She said
both sounded nice.
And something
in the way she said nice,
led me to believe
she landed on an unspoken
third option.  I no
longer had an appetite for *** that evening,
but we acted on it to satisfy expectation.
She turned down the air conditioner,
and we laid there shivering and saying little.
She told me not to leave her.
I said I wouldn't.
I'm in the tub now and the bottle is almost empty
and all of this is so selfish and stupid
and I'm just doing it for the sake of habit
and sad sack poetry and ultimately
an "I-Eat-*****" consolation fedora in heaven. And I'm
self aware but the trajectory spirals against my will.
And my life entire burns a little slapstick,
so I get outside of myself--watch, enjoy.