To Myself

SOME NIGHTS I wish that I took poetry lessons to heart. To learn Language. To make it dance then break its legs. To make it crawl out of the page, make it punch people in the gut, or maybe in the face. To know its dirtiest kinks and please it like a lover until it writhes and shivers and screams.

But tonight let’s just file these thoughts in a folder called “dreams.”

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To Myself
Franz Wright

You are riding the bus again
burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,
the sole passenger

with an overhead light on.
And I am with you.
I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,

the little lights off in the distance
(in one of those rooms we are
living) and I am the rain

and the others all
around you, and the loneliness you love,
and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe,

and the catastrophic dawn,
the nicotine crawling on your skin—
and when you begin

to cough I won’t cover my face,
and if you vomit this time I will hold you:
everything’s going to be fine

I will whisper.
It won’t always be like this.
I am going to buy you a sandwich.

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The poem is from Franz Wright’s Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems. The featured image is 20,000 Leagues Beyond My Mind by Dawani de Leon.