In the alley I found a lingering doubt
that sang jazz into a jeweled microphone in a voice that reminded me of
something I couldn’t remember
I prodded at it after a moment’s hesitation with stubby delicate fingers
it snorted mid song and pawed at the ground, digging for Bangkok and every
seedy bar where it left its best intentions.
Maybe it was odd, though I didn’t feel it, rather I related with it:
we as the pronoun’s proper couple, a match made in a Melbourne club that
marries and asks why only after the honeymoon when it becomes
apparent it was attracted only to my mood taking physicality and pride out of the picture.
I wore a drunken crown like an irrelevant monarch. The doubt’s breath was
maccas stained. We pecked each other on the cheek and made do with
the false assumption the people watching us wolf whistled.
This turn around, I thought, is for the better: a return to a humor too long
buried beneath an imitated and assumed identity.
My doubt sniffles at the end of its song and won’t surrender the tenuous finger
hold it has on my smooth exterior,
beneath this lack of certainty I can say and write nothing safely
instead I am left with the notion that everything I held to be fate cannot fall
away from my fatalist lifestyle
which is a pity
even though I won’t admit it.
The sun claws at me through the mouth of the road I venture down (often a
cliché will say what I need it to without aversion to its everyday
normality)
while the memory of your white naked body spreading thin and wide on a
narrow bed is not enough for me anymore
and in this case doubt has abandoned me to my own creative devices,
to the knowledge, well held, that what I have is enough.
The fold in your teeth sustains me.
