the monster would be a good thing. i’d have hidden somewhere,
possibly a bedroom. thinking: i really really do not want to be alone
but there, i would’ve made myself just that.
probably the alonest person in the whole world.
drink-not-drunk and placed on someone’s bookshelf.
i wouldn’t remember every party ever always being this phenomenally shit.
i wouldn’t look at photo frames or catch my breath, no, i’d consider
the walk from here to the bus stop, the bus to the bus stop
the walk from the bus stop home. cry in a particularly embarrassing
and attention-seeking way for someone without an audience.
the ginormous problem of existence gnaws away at me, usually as a stuffy nose.
but right then, as an actual inability to keep my feet flat on the floorboards,
to keep my lungs hot-churning air and outside, in the hallway,
they would be playing techno-pop. this is when the monster would say hello.
i am occasionally envious of that sort of thing. three-eyed, blue-green, children-eating terrors. good classic nameable fear.
its huge palm would extend into the window, belly’s silhouette out there in the dark,
three chubby fingers curling around my body. delicious to be fittable in
something’s grasp. and the night would be in absence entirely.
down there, polka-dot lights in a tiny patch of garden,
music like a crackle or a spark.
but the monster would take big slow footsteps across the city, like he’s underwater. and the trees would tumble as we go. and i’d be absolutely
the littlest thing around. there’d be no room inside me for anything but insect-like blood and
bones and all the tiny, tiny people will not have noticed i have gone.
he probably feels giant and clumsy all the time.
he probably cannot work out why everything around him keeps falling apart.
i think he is probably giving me a lift home.