I really need to get out more, out of
wooden coffee huts where I drink
jacked-up java from a pencil hole
in a plastic-lidded white paper cup
with a brown cardboard cardigan and room enough
for cream and to stir
without sloshing over the rim,
while behind me an impatient commuter with
Ray Bans propped up on her head
is waiting to add Splenda to her latte.
I need to get out of these sanitized birdbaths and
get to a toxic water hole like maybe a sleazy
bar downtown, where the bartender doesn’t smile or
make eye contact, doesn’t ask you what he can get
for you like he was a diner waitress,
where it’s too dark, too smoky, too noisy
to write poetry and you’d get the crap
beat out of you if you were caught doing it.
I really need to get out more, get out of town,
get out of Tennessee, get out of the Bible belt,
out of the Southeast where I’ve lived every one
of my 48 white middle-class conservative Protestant
years as though I repeated the first grade 47 times.
I’m not sure what it is about this experience
I need to “pass”
before I can get crazy and move to Colorado, California
by way of Arizona, then Portland, maybe
Seattle where the constant rain
might flush out her memory
but could also cause my depression to mold and mildew
like the window casings in our house in south Florida
where it stormed everyday at 3:00 and
never got cold enough to kill allergies, mosquitoes, or
crackheads who’d break into anything in
broad daylight to steal something for cocaine.
After 9 years I got the hell out of there.
But I think maybe I need to get out of the country,
get out of God Bless America and see the world,
get that book of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die,
a thousand places to see, smell, hear, taste, touch
before I die and I can’t see, smell, hear, taste, or
feel nothing cause I’m stuck inside a cranked-shut,
sealed silver box with white satin lining, wishing
I could get out more.
I really should get out more, break out
of my skeletal cage and slip quietly out of my skin,
open the window and scale my body down
to the bushes, break curfew, and
damn the consequences.