The worst advice I’ve ever gotten in my life
Is always be authentic, always be yourself.

There is a difference between what a word can promise
And where the eye my wander toward the unspeakable

Or the strange and intangible pieces to an uncommon
Puzzle, what a soul may occupy, or the unreasonable

Where, among metaphysics, one floats, pleasure
Without pain, skinless outliers and schizies—

That’s why you got those bangs, that tattoo,
That pair of large glasses: a spirit manifests

In all, the individual in closed doors and lovely curtains
Scented by Marlboros, ****, and eclectic music

That’s why you have that copy of Infinite Jest
You’ve never read, with Joyce and the Beats

Next to you as you, infideliously, meet the daydreams
You only flirt with at work—

Ah, the stranger seems so much more enticing
Than all the young beauties we’ve known our whole lives

For they are the silver screen, the metallic perfection
To a world in disarray; courage in a frightful world intoxicates,

The embattled image of a perfect world plastered allwheres
Streaming, on demand, inside those drapes;

Ah, to chill in one’s own skin, to be the room
Where love is made, where the labor of being

Sits like neon lights in shop window rows,
Feeding the night air with their entrepreneurialism

Doctored eagerly to look natural, roughly hewn
To seem artisanal, open-concept, industrial within ego

Dimly light, large filaments invite others with familiar
Defamiliarity, to stare into the windows that stare back

Smiling; they know what it means to be me on the surface
Of my skin, and so, you know what it means to be them.

Like any hustle, you follow their eyes in real time
As the reflection of a stranger, the connection

Is merely the inverted image of one’s own desire—
The individual is but the ungrateful child of the collective,

The city street illumes with lamplight, far too luminous
Far too luminous as we see its ugliness,

This self-styled exile to pit one’s self against the entire city
Begging for laws, for maps, for something to hold on to

Some purchase in the cliffs with barricade this ivory tower
A suffering for something like god, that is and is not

The sum of belief, the sum of appearance, the sum of consumption
Rings in the tiny doorway bell, but only on the festival days

That attract social capital, enough to invest in the dream
Of you, only to buy out the cute downtown strip

To leave the streets littered with yellow receipts
And glass containers dried of their memories.