not on the map

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.