It's summer and the sky pushes down its pregnant
stomach until there is no room to breath.
You want to reach up your arms and cut the rain out.
thinking lately about how strange it is
that your neighbors never bother to shut the door
to have an argument
anymore. It's too hot for that,
you understand,
but the stuff of their conversations is fast
becoming the building material of your dreams
and when you wake up hung over,
it's as if you've been another person for four hours.
It's summer and the sun is a cauterizing flame.
They fight about this dog they own together
fight about how it bit the man-- oh it was so long ago-- but
he still can't look at the thing without thinking about the flash
of it moving at him and there's this stupid
phrase that's stuck in his
head about it:
animal enamel.
When you wake up thinking
you're this man, your stomach
hurts because you're so weak--
a weak man who hates a dog
because he's not smart enough to realize
that he actually hates a girl. How could he
hate a girl he's loved since high school?
But then your eyes adjust to the light
and you
remember that you don't give a fuck about dogs
and you
make yourself a cup of coffee
and you
feel better.
It's summer and the line of tombstones
on the freeway inches toward a terrible sun.
Sitting in the shade of the
stairs that lead up to your
place you wonder if it's a problem
specific to your generation
that you feel so much but can't
seem to think straight.
You set out to make lists of things
that could be the cause--
something in the water,
partisan politics,
the absence of authentic American cuisine--but then
you get distracted and it becomes a grocery list
which you lose later on,
emptying your pockets,
looking for your cigarettes.
