Disregard the three hour conversation over our dinner of tripe hotpot
I finally agreed to meet you for
while in town to interview—
that Spring I was having a ⅓-Life Crisis,
just before turning 30,
trying to find a quieter way to live.
I wanted to explain a decade.
What I meant what this:
I thought happiness so rare & momentary,
isolation such an illusion,
poetry only a meat grinder for the self-obsessed,
that I’d rather be sieved
into iron-rich fodder
than see the sausage made any longer.
I was distracted then.
Always using too many words to say the wrong thing.
My tongue was cleaved around a prayer of hope.
What I felt was this:
once, I was so young I thought we were apprentices of joy,
and would one day present each other with its sigil—
proof to the world we knew love.