I feel like a failure today
Dancing around in my underwear
Open the fridge: junk food.
Don’t want to eat it. Take it, eat it anyway
Are you my conscience?
Tell me where my wrists are, then.
So it sounds like I’m
Stuck. I’m too good at life to feel depressed, but
Here it is, like a medal that finds itself on my neck every morning
Heavy on my ribcage.
It's either crippling sadness or abnormal, sudden fits of joy.
No balance yet. Furrowing in the middle is messy.
Zero friends. No boyfriend.
So bored. For the first time ever
I laughed while jerking off
Because what’s the point
Of pleasure.
Neverends, pleasure.
I open an unread book, then I
Close. Open another. Close again
Watch TV for a while
Wash my face
Look at old photographs of
My mother.
There’s this one. Me, a child.
My mouth singing to her hairbrush, pretending it's a mic.
Then another, me about to
Eat cake
And my mother
In work clothes
Smiling for the picture, cutting
The cake. I wonder how
Much she bought it for at the time.
I wonder
What people thought in the ‘90s
When they see a girl with short hair
Bringing cake home, holding
It by the string, suspended
Like a present.
It’s a nice photo.
It’s one of the nicest photos
I’ve seen of my mother.
Today the sun is out
For a while.
Maybe sunlight can help
Me feel anything
Other than dread.
I lust. I falter.
I put the junk food foils in the trash.
I feed the birds and, I praise
The Lord.
Sorry, lord
The breadth of your kingdom
Is lost in plain, bored me.