One minute I am

swishing Manny’s

tapping on an airplane bottle

full of Fireball

in my breast pocket-

a gay senator cracks

a joke at my expense

I am growing deaf to jokes

so I don’t really know

if it was actually made

at my expense

SO I KEEP LAUGHING LOUDER

humoring the funny man and

slapping the knees of my funny friends.

The next minute I am

not surrounded by friends

they have all become strangers

I have shrunken into a shy child

with a supple soul

ducking behind countertops

from Monsters

to get away from Monsters

The next minute I am

a Monster

looking into her eyes,

“Tonight is the only night”

The next minute there is

a knife lodged between the carpet

of the hallway

& the linoleum of the bathroom

no one is dead

it is Christmas eve

there isn’t any snow

just walking into punches of debris,

Jim Beam, Jager, and sex smearing

itself onto my shirt

walking into another fuzzy

minute

channeling dead poets

and wondering if my words

will ever levitate like theirs

the next minute

I am not here.