#4

The Poets
j vogel

I get all my emotions secondhand anyway, I told them at the reading, buy
my tears from the used bookshop down the block, pickpocket
movie stars for my sniffles. Then I told them to shove it, to feel something
fresher than what I thought they’d pumped out of me.
Told them how I’d even painted my dime-store squirt gun a steely
black, held it to a homeless man’s head,
said give me your hunger—give it to me now. Told them how he
just shivered a little and didn’t do much of anything
so I shot him and he handed me his eyeglasses.
I put them on and walked away into the blur without
saying thank you.
But it was all too much for me I guess and I walked into a streetlamp.
The homeless man heard my eyeglasses break into seven
different pieces, one for each day of the week and he laughed at me.
Then I started shivering and couldn’t stop, so at the poetry
reading when I told them to cut the shit, the poets
just laughed. My friend’s watch had just stopped, the one his grandmother
had given him just before she died, before she tripped and fell over a pair
of broken eye glasses and hit her head in the street, bled out
beneath a streetlamp. So I lifted the watch from him and it brought
some tears to my eye but the poets,
the poets just kept laughing and handed me a cup of soup, something brown
with little carrot circles drowning in it. I wanted to be
one of those carrot pieces and I was about to drink it when they told me
to give it to the homeless man outside the building.
He’s blind, the poets said, the carrots might be good for him.
I took it downstairs and drank it as fast as I could. It burned my throat.
Then I took off all my clothes and tried to find that homeless man, tell him,
here, I am a carrot, maybe I can help. But by then I was
blind and couldn’t find my way out of the building.