Another poem

So I wrote this other poem here about the type of parties that I have never come to fully understand. Or to put it better, this is about the parties that have always left me feeling some type of empty. These are the parties that carve something out of the conscious. They are the parties whose means never seem to justify their ends the morning after. Where the motivations become lost in the obscuring fog of dug-up desires. Lost in the chemicals that make all of us college-aged kids act out our impulses. The impulses that reveal the flaws of our upbringing. These are the parties you go to, the parties where you know some guy or some girl and maybe bring some friends but the rest of the cast of characters are strangers, to you and to themselves.

So, I wrote this in the span of twenty minutes in the library one day.

And by no surprise, it was one day after a party like this.


High Life

This isn’t going to be easy
but imagine yourself
in a room
filled with people.

Now imagine that these people are just like you:
Young, casually over-dressed, and dissatisfied with the way their young, over-dressed lives have been going so far.
Now imagine the house around the room around yourself and all these people.
Imagine peeling yellow wallpaper and thick glass windows with tarnished brass locks.
Imagine a sticky wooden floor.
Now remind yourself that outside this house there must be seasons, and a sun and a moon.
Imagine that it is late October and nighttime and that leaves continue to fall outside this house like snow.
Back inside this house, there is a party going on.
There is a keg inside a tub of ice and water inside a kitchen where red plastic cups seem to be growing from the countertops like toadstools.
In the next room, imagine a ping-pong table. Imagine two people and ten red plastic cups on each side.
Now surround that table with screaming and hip-hop.
Now place two couches that shouldn’t face each other facing each other.
Take the uglier of those two couches.
Now place two people making out on the center of that couch.
Now remind yourself that she has an abusive father and he has a drinking problem.
Next, imagine two guys in a corner running their eyes over every girl in the room as if the female body were made of velvet.
Picture two girls walking in through the back door at this very moment.
Then watch as one of those girls gets a glimpse of someone she used to love rubbing himself against a girl in a denim skirt in the living room in front of the thick glass windows, now frosted from the growing body heat.
Now imagine the needle of a tattoo gun.
Imagine the electric sting of that needle as it punctures the word embarrassment under the skin of that scorned girl at the backdoor.
Next, imagine a front porch that is weathered and sagging and tired and imagine a half-dozen people pulling cigarettes from fresh packs and shivering and blowing smoke toward a pale yellow moon.
Now go back inside and imagine a bedroom upstairs where another half-dozen people sprawl into a circle and pass a pipe around a foggy room.
Imagine the sounds of coughing and hip-hop as they creep out from under the door and into the hallway.
Down the stairs, imagine a group of girls, dressed for July, dancing close like a small herd of animals that know they will soon be preyed upon.
Imagine the rush of thin blood.
Imagine v-neck blouses and pre-torn jeans grinding and mashing in time with a strobe that pulses in epileptic fits.
Imagine the collective heartbeats of these dancers, pumping a savage beat, like war drums, like a wild cry for sex and violence.
Now fast-forward to bodies crashing and gliding in a stranger’s room. Fast-forward to the hot injection of blood and sweat that smells of vodka.
Imagine people in every room darting glances from strange face to strange face, praying to snag a look from someone who is willing to let them in for a night.
Imagine people in every room with heads light like mountain climbers knocking on heaven’s door.
Imagine people in every room with paper skin stretched thin over their bones, waiting for an imprint that will last.
Imagine people in every room dying every weekend night for the right to say to those they will love in the future that they too felt alive once.
Imagine fear and anger and lust and passion and hope and hopelessness in a single house on a single night.

Now, imagine yourself
alone
in a room filled with people.