Lou Marquis

Navel-Gazing

Over the winter, I workshopped it.
I rearranged the bones, transplanted

the muscle fibers from runner’s legs into
a lawyer’s voice box, let the hair grow out

and hated it, bled the better sense. Time was
more disorienting than it had ever been,

than it had been when I didn’t know what
time was, than it had been when I pulled

my own pigtails and screamed. The anticipated
loneliness was worse than the actual loneliness:

Am I practicing? Will I master it? or am I wasting
the finite reserves of solitude? I trust myself to

not go crazy, but who hasn’t drowned themselves
once or twice? Who hasn’t leveled up to the deep end

without knowing how to swim? God, my friends
would be so supportive of this brooding.

They wouldn’t put me straight, no, they’d relish
in it, say things like, you don’t have to know who

you are to be true to yourself! Or Nobody wants
to know anymore, anyway – we totally get it!

I want to scream at them: HOW CAN I TRUST YOU?
with all of your good-intentions, and your multi-

lateral judgements, and your artistic lenses, and
the way we stare at each other’s belly buttons

and tell each other, you could pull the sun down
on top of the earth, and I’d still understand you.

Spit

I
May 1998

Before the turn of the century,
I race against June and lose by the skin of my teeth.

Every year, I race again.

II
May 2016

I walk home from school before lunch time – sedated.
My history teacher tells me that he knows my parents
and they must pray for me to be better than this.

I tell him, he must not really know my parents.

III
May 2022

It’s pay week,
and the hum of a looming energy crisis echoes
inside the electric sedan peeling out behind me
on University Street.

I put myself on the ground and try to read
the minds of every person in this parking lot.

They might understand it all better than I do,
but probably not.

IV
May 1998

There must be a reason
(greater than diet and labor)
that I forfeited May this year.

Every glorious turn of the world
decides what impossible thing
it wants to spit out.

Every child is the product
of some perfect coincidence.
June must’ve been the softest place to land
but I still miss that which I have never had.

V
May 1998

(I want to know)
I’ll never know
(I need to know)
I’ll never know