I have a way with the ladies they say but the ladies are actually origami cranes folding themselves into question marks whenever I enter a room while the ceiling fan spins detective novels into the air and I'm pretty sure my coffee mug is judging me for being the kind of person who thinks he has a way with the ladies which is really just another way of saying I collect shadows in mason jars and pretend they're meaningful conversations the truth is the ladies have a way with reality that I'll never understand because they exist in dimensions where my noir fantasy dissolves like sugar cubes in rain and maybe that's the point maybe I'm just a metaphor having an existential crisis in a poem that thinks it's cleverer than it actually is while somewhere a real detective is solving real mysteries but here I am collecting punctuation marks like alibis