But when they spoke, their eyes couldn’t come together.
You never know who is looking at you in the dark.
For how long can I continue to watch the tips of my shoes,
and the floor beneath them, and worry wordlessly about home?
It’s all peachy, really, it’s Video Killed the Radio Star.
Then again, it’s an unlit candle, an unmarked calendar,
or Ginsberg burning dollar bills in a bin, grinning behind
a grisly beard, or a man you only know vaguely from some talk
of a reality TV show becoming America’s next President.
People are incapable of concealing their latent resentments
When they are looking at something else, but at you?
What’s in a gaze anyway? What are you looking at, for whom?
If there was somebody, they have left already. Prior appointments
available only to high flyers, PowerPoint presenters, success stories.
Not available to you. You who are so aware that in a single minute
everything could be different. You who says goodbye but
never knowing how to leave. These moments are split, a smile
Splitting open a face that once scared you. See? See how different it is?
It’s different to be seen by different people, but are you ever seen?
If you are, you really shouldn’t be. Not on any road, in any doorway,
at any bus stop. But you have to get there somehow.
There are good people everywhere, doing terrible things,
and if I’m not going to be one of the good people, I don’t mind so much
being a terrible thing. If it means I’ll be looked for, used,
needed for whatever, even if I know that needs are fulfilled
and the things you think you need are usually what you want, actually,
or what you want to need. But probably the last thing you really need.
You really need to get that appointment. It isn’t enough
to put out the fires. Damage control- how sad, if it’s what you do best.
What you really do best is what other people tell you that you do best.
It doesn’t alter the experience, even one moment’s fragment of it,
if you know from the start how it’s going to end.