In Farmington the misfit suffers the jukebox and dances to an unknown song. He dances on the pool table. He wears black—black skull cap, black
duster, black shirt, black slacks, black boots. He's in Farmington and
the women here drink Bud Light. He dances slow. It's similar to a dance
you've seen before. You have that friend that climbs on couches after a few and half staggers, half sways. The women here watch him with unhappy eyes and hands stained blue from the textile mill. He seems to mouth the words although he clearly doesn't know the song. They, the women, dig their elbows into the bar. Pocked and graffiti'd, the bar soaks up spilled beer and ash and nail polish. Behind the bar a sign reads: Free Beer Tomorrow. And for some reason, you must admit, this sign's effect never dulls. The Misfit pantomimes a dance with a pool cue. His face is severe, serious. He's in Farmington dancing with a pool cue on a pool table to a song he doesn't know like a drunk friend of yours and the women are watching. Next, he does something amazing. He removes his cap. He's got shocks of bleached hair and burn scars run like rivulets between the patches. He tosses the cap toward the bar. One lucky woman catches it and summons herself to the pool table. You want them to have a bit of dialogue here, to say something oblique and innocent. Instead the lucky woman dances at the man's feet. He surrenders a smile and he's got small tracts of bleached hair and burn scars and he's in all black and he's dancing. The lucky woman, she's in a canary yellow patch dress. Her dance, although clumsy, still mesmerizes you. It's without ego, without shame. She is a child. She is the light in the room. She is, in this moment, the world entire. He pulls her onto the table. It's time to appoint the Misfit and the lucky woman names, you think. His name shall be Joshua. Her name shall be Anna. Palms together, her head resting on his chest, they sway. The smoke and the tracers of light meld and Joshua and Anna's outlines become muddied. Their bodies merge and they are both yellow and black and covered in burn scars and bleached hair and the women are still watching. As the song starts to fade, someone—maybe it's you—drops a few coins in the jukebox and it begins again.

Forever, I touch the word, running my fingertips
along the coffee table we saved up for. Forever,
I whisper the word to the carpet where you
used to pin me down. Forever, I feel it on my chin,
I take it on the chin. Forever, we'll have sunshine,
little breaks in the fog. Forever, if I can even find you
then. Forever, the joke we said with wine-stained lips
and ash in our mouths. Forever, we dreamed each other
foreign and lived inside. Forever, the muse and never
the poet, the pen and never the paper, the writer and never the
reader. Forever, the way you talked down to me in t-shirts
too large for your shoulder blades. Forever, I take it on the chin.
Forever, the word, I feel it in my neck now. Forever, the affectation
in my voice, do you hear it now? Forever, the seeker in the company
of the sightless. Forever, the weaver. Forever, the weaver threading me into you. Forever, the weaver. Forever, the weaver winding me into you, unwinding me back into myself. Forever, the weaver, the ******* the dance floor, the tower of song, the siren, the sonnet, the beacon, the tower of song, the ******* the dance floor, the weaver, forever.

Better natured today than yesterday,
smelling less like cigarettes and more
like laundry detergent, you sit across
from your therapist at the bar and
ask for one more boilermaker.
You say, How do you desire what you already possess?

And your therapist says, Don't go down that drunk.
That's a bad drunk.

You're in a floral print A-line dress, one
you bought from your sister-in-law.
She's doing one of those multilevel marketing things
and though her Facebook posts make you want
to suicide yourself, she's happy and independent
and at home with her kids. Despite these lukewarm
feelings, you harbor some resentment as you finger
and thumb a seam that's already coming undone.

Sloane. Your husband keeps mentioning a woman
at the office named Sloane. You're at the bar,
almost alone, and promised yourself
you wouldn't think about Sloane. But here you are.
Sloane in a pencil skirt and stockings. Sloane
with a fresh ****** energy, the kind you can't
seem to summon, and you wonder why ***
is such an important thing. It's so brief,
forgettable, full of abject compromise.

*** is an inherently violent act, don't you think?
You say to the therapist.  

If your therapist hears you, he doesn't respond.
You don't repeat the question.

You watch yourself broadcast on the TV above the bar.
They're commenting on your hair and your arms
and going on and on about your likability.

Your therapist changes the mood. It's 6:30.
He gives the place a nighttime feel.
He kills a row of lights and turns on the
colored bulbs, the blues and greens.
The TV is turned down. The music is turned up.

This is what you've been waiting for, the lights, the music.
There's an hour before anyone really shows up. You can
close your eyes and drift.

Two or three drinks pass. A couple walks in.
You have your therapist put in for an Uber.

Maybe I've been asking the question the wrong way, you say.

Oh yeah? the therapist says.

Yeah. Maybe the question should be reversed.
Maybe the question should be
how do you remain desirable to the objects you possess?

That seems like a lot of work. Seems like you'd have no
sense of self. You'd always be bending.

I've been a plus one for a long time.
You say bending. But I wouldn't be
doing anything new. I already do all these things.
But I see them as a compromise. I'm just trying
to reframe, you know?

Why? your therapist asks.

You open your mouth and find no words. You smile. You say you've had too much. You're rambling. You're sorry. You better go.

I buy the gluten-free protein bar, peanut butter and chocolate, because this is who I am now. This is me. This is me as a lighthouse of personal fitness, a man of discipline, of a principle or two. And I surf only the most densely populated dating apps, looking—somewhat feverishly, I must admit—for a likeminded woman, a scholar, a child of the moon, a frequent quoter of the Dhammapada, an insatiable and acrobatic lover, and I imagine her driving the dark streets seeking me. Polly in a Prius. My future muse, near but out of reach. We'll reclaim the arts district. She'll piggyback to the open mike, her ****-me shoes clicking in her hand. We'll spend a year politicizing every ****** encounter. Consensual assaults in perpetuity. And she'll say I'm a white man. And she'll say I think this is my privilege. And she'll say she's into leather and she finds my *** offensive and she'll hold my head against the wall. And at the end, if there's an end, I imagine our naked bodies wrapped in a stained comforter, all of the desire spent. I imagine our minds sober and clear, wondering how we could have ever been so kinked out, so on fire for something, and yet so ******* unable to remember a single ****** or whether or not we transcended. I'll vacuum the apartment. Polly will take her Warhol prints, pack up the Prius, and go anywhere, anywhere not here. Seattle. Maybe Portland. A few weeks will pass, and I'll find a note in whatever book I'd been reading before she left. It'll say: I loved you to the max. I loved you to the max. I loved you to the max.

Silver vein'd and shaking through.
The night oppresses me with a speed relentless
and a sound constant: the insect hum, the air conditioned rattle.
And I drop myself and I tuck myself and I sleep myself
as best I can.
And her hushed song, her morning song, her routine song,
while she plucked herself white and shaved herself clean,
enters the sacred corridors of my sleep. And her face burns
into my mind. Something religious. She's a godhead,
one who exists with or without my permission. And I'd
sing along with her if it weren't for the sleeping. But I'm
diffusing all responsibility and I'm creeping toward the center
of that otherworld, where logic and time bow to her
and who am I?
so I bow too.
The days of my old life, the ones well lived, bleed in
and the regrets smooth themselves out and I dab at
her makeup with a wet napkin and I say this:

Do you have any idea how many times I've said
I love you to an empty room?

To be refleshed at the end of your last true summer,
to have fingertips—not your own—pry away the old
skin and charge the nerves of the new,
how could you plan something like that?
You're in a new body and in an old house.
The window unit moans. ***** clothes cover the floor.
He's more than fingertips now. He's uncombed hair.
He's shirtless and he's breath and he's in your mouth
and the taste is sweet, familiar, and just far enough away
to turn nameless and evaporate from where all names
originate: the tongue.

But he still delivers his tongue to you, your back arching,
you're a lost instrument singing, the notes bending, the
melody transforming, until God's refrain rings and ricochets
noiselessly in the chambers of your skull.
In space there is no center, you're always off to the side.

And he's there, at your side, and you both stare at the ceiling fan
and laugh. What else can you do? He is still. You are still.
He starts to say your name. No more words. We are home.

I buy a shirt, a blue shirt, a button down.
I drink a glass of wine, a red, a Malbec.
And I watch.
I stand still in the midst
of the St. Cloud Market.
The crowd—that singular being—
jostles and jockeys and talks
in broken English.
I chew gum, cinnamon gum, Nicorette.
I feel my habit inverting, bending, becoming mechanical.
And I must flirt and be moral
with the shopkeeper who looks a little
like me.
And I must revert to an irrational, emotional,
childlike state as I buy three pirated DVDs.

The crowd forms a circle instinctually.
Three women dance slowly in the center.
Paper falls from the sky, newsprint, a day old.

Gunfire, the sound of it, its slowing of time.
No one says a thing
and no one's feet make a sound and
every child is perfectly behaved
for one relentless moment.