You won’t find solace here

you spent an entire four months in an apartment ten stories high,
living in the eight
floor,
surviving with cheap
noodle sticks and beer
and cigarettes and
knock-off biscuits
the elevator
was broken, so most of the time
you had to climb up and bring up
your own furniture
till you started giving up
on comforts like a good sofa
and new flatscreens,
and your neighbors, they were no friends
of yours,
you didn’t have yours
they had lives built before you became
a sorry tenant, a busy tenant
just another, just another
so many had lived and left there before
they no longer need to submerge on the drama of an obvious canyon
the children played loud, the teens
even louder music in hallways
getting high on morphine or speed or
blunts
they asked you once,
‘what made you sign the lease?’
‘solace,’ you said
to which, a smack of a reply,
‘you won’t find your solace here’
and that was the last time you heard them speak
before their fathers resumed beating them with a slipper,
or a belt,
or a stick,
which ever was nearby the bottle of gin
that they hopefully pray will blind them all
so you denied, did you not,
denied every day,
that this is where people, broken and bested,
must thrive in order to no longer be broken nor bested
and their keepers, some times failing,
still worked the hard hours and graveyard shifts
looking almost like cadavers themselves, almost
becoming like cadavers themselves
a week before you moved out, you witnessed a methhead get evicted
for not being able to pay three months
so they took her fridge
and the nothing inside it
and the landlord looked so triumphant like he just squashed a bug under his ugly heel
her boyfriend goes around, some times,
asks if she’s back
you say,
‘i didn’t really know her’
‘but you live across, right across’, he
decries
you don’t recall
and how could you?
you weren’t even truly aware what you were busy on, those days
it’s mostly just trying to regenerate from so many office calls and online drama
and trying your luck with soft boys,
tough boys,
impatient boys,
cruel boys,
but never men
no, men have their ways, men take a lot of work, men wants to build a life, men want to go out on real dates
and so you contemplated
how soft the ground must feel
must it be like your broken bed
and will it be enough for one swift kill
and you barf the ways of your faux-leather wallet into health insurance
and fail to get up to date with the latest blockbuster
and become content as a wifi thief
and not becoming your parents
never becoming your parents
(in your youth, you wanted to be young,
in your adulthood, you wanted to be young,
later in your inability to check into a good retirement home,
you’ll still keep on wanting to be young)
you yearn so much to create and fascinate
but abandoned so many, and by so many,
and assassinated
even more
souls
you are a perisher, grand and all passing and passive,
sipping by and snipping while the liquor in your stomach
pumps,
every cup tells you of what you already know
and things you already did
how foolish, the rocks and the thermite,
the building walls upon walls only to be brought down by the confidantes
and the sour skillset, like confetti, prudent and quick to bill
and march like a deacon of your lipstick
you spend a lot of nights by bus terminals, feeling lonely,
waiting for texts you’ll never receive
and love they can barely give
(they never all love and get you quite right, now, don’t they?
you must be such a complicated person whose only talent
is complicating things)