You won’t find solace here

you spent an entire four months in an apartment ten stories high, /
living on the eight / floor, / surviving on 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 / ’til you started giving up /
on comforts like a good sofa / and new flat-screens, /

and your neighbors, they were no friends /
of yours, / you didn’t offer any introduction /
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 onto nothingness of another obvious nothingness /

and the children played loudly, 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, you were kissed with, / 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 near 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 meth-head 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 and make a lot of work, / men want 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 upto date with the latest blockbuster /
and become content as wi-fi thieving, / 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 skill set, 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)