Poem Written while Tispy

Two shot lightweight!

Boy who has fought in many battles

You slouch in your deskchair, defeated.
Nervous worries tunnel through
Thursday’s apathetic afternoon.
How can light be pale? is a thought
that can’t quite make you feel
comfortable with all of this.
As if answers were transport.
Understanding all of this shit
was never meant to make you comfortable with it.
I can’t even remember Monday, you think.
But who can?

So you keep combing your fingers
through ever-increasingly greasy hair
and the snow outside piles up,
the air turns over,
begins to taste like gin,
and the light illuminated the world outside
becomes flat like when you listen to the music
pouring out of your headphones
and the world becomes a flat mirror
held up to the mouth of the cave
that your hoodie has transformed into.

Keep bottoming out
and maybe some day you’ll get the courage
not to favor convenience over independence.
That one knuckle’s received an awful lot of abuse lately
but the hope lives that calluses will grow over time.

A cat throwing up is the sound of love,
whose name you will never learn
because selfishness has tied its hands.

You would turn out the lights too
if you knew how we looked from the outside.