Haphazard Speculation(s)

— E.E. Cummings

Even Littles have to grow up in some ways too.

i have this weird anxiety of being the last person in a room after there were so many people in the room. i’ve found that is my least favorite part of co-hosting poetry events, the abrupt stop when everything stops being poetry and the stuff the poetry contained spills out. that end part, that’s where the metaphor comes to life, just until i can run out of the room. i run out of the room the way you run out of a room when the lights go out, and before whatever is under the bed comes out to grab you by the ankles. i think i’m afraid of my solitude not recognizing itself in the dark, not being able to see its fingers and just getting desperate enough to sneer itself lonely in defense against anyone recognizing it for what it’s not. i am okay being alone but sometimes i’m not because i realize that i am. does that make sense

i’m sitting on the stoop and i can’t see the moon from here anymore. t’s behind the house, but i know it looks so eerie tonight, diffused in a subtle way so that it still gets to be annihilating. kind of like a sneer but not at all. i can keep it in my head so the orange streetlight trying to replace the atmosphere around my stoop isn’t as effective as it wants to be.

i was eating phish food ice cream and a black and white cat with dubloons for eyes decided she wanted to be my friend. i feel like she hatched out of the moon and that’s why i can’t see it from where i’m sitting. i was humming and she rested her face on my lap in a human sort of way and let me hug her and i can’t stop thinking about it, about how her tail could have been a palm smoothing my face back and forth. every time i asked her a question she would look at me. i asked her if she was my friend, if she knew the future, if nights would stop ending like the sad poems.