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POEM
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Tonight the billiards sound
like little continents crackling
against one another's plates,
I don't even need to close my eyes.
I have a strange, familiar urge
to make a fool of myself,
to fall in love and be mocked for it.

At a table surrounded
by many siblings of wood
and incessantly pouring metal,
a group of women are talking.
I want to know
what they are talking about,
but I won't move
tonight.

I will sit here and think hopefully
of the day when I actually die:
a friend will be sitting nearby,
and then she will leave.
Me with a window alone, going.
Not the window I'd hoped for,
but more than enough; let it drain
my sight outward and outward
in sweetened failure.

I will surge momentarily, suspiciously
like a mere man, toward your chair,
and when you fill it again,
I'll have accepted my bed
for being close enough.
There is nothing on the sill's ledge,
there are many things in the sky.
I have never been alone with it; now
let me be alone with it.