That’s me, pacing on a porch.
That’s me, sitting in front of an open door
with a lap dog and a baseball bat 
when the shelf cloud comes in and
reminds me that I wasted the last
six years creating new versions of
myself in a wrestling video game
that no one wants to play.
We wiped clean what we should have rebooted—
we french-fried when we should have pizza’d.
I had to concede so many dreams
this year, like my old neighborhoods
and the way you used to look when
no one was around but us buttheads.
I don’t mean to leave you alone on this continent, but the truth is
there’s no such thing as a meaningful voice mail anymore—
there’s nothing left but the silence in my pocket,
the 2 AM walks to the corner deli that
neither of us needed, and the 600 empty calories
that prove pain, too, is a flavor.
I am low on hope and my lungs
have no rights anymore, because this 
whole fucking year is one long drone strike—
it’s the leftover coconut water in the back of the fridge—
it’s the orchestrated dissonance in the chorus of a pop song
that we’re only supposed to sing when we remember
how hard it is to be stuck in traffic.