rusted so much away they simply stopped

knowing how to hold each other

tighter than they could

hold the brakes.

I understand that I am nothing without them.

I understand that I am something that is nothing

without love. But what in this world

would I rather be than something

that is nothing without love?

It’s worth the rest of my days

covered in dust.

NEIGHBORS

Debbie O’Doyle hated me. She couldn’t help it.

The dreadlocked white boys who’d rented the house

before me spent their tuition money turning the basement

into a psychedelic farm, and retirees with plastic deer

lawn ornaments rarely enjoy being woken up at 3AM

by flower-crowned sorority girls riding their plastic fawn

through the center of a previously respectable street.

After three years of pressing binoculars to her window,

writing down the license plate numbers of every Jeep Wrangler

with an I’M A FUNGI bumper sticker, Debbie finally convinced

the cops to bust the door down and harvest the fun guys

(which was bountiful for me only because the lock

wasn’t properly fixed and the landlord was forced to knock

$100 off my first month’s rent).

Debbie O’Doyle didn’t see me as an upgrade to the neighborhood,

I suspect, because I had nothing to show for myself on move-in day

except a box of tattered books, an old bicycle, and a couch

I’d found on the curb a block away which she’d seen me roll

on two skateboards to the front door, tattooed and shoeless,

singing a folk song with the F-word in the chorus.

Here’s another one come to grow mushrooms

in a turd pile under the house, she must have thought,

having no way of knowing I wouldn’t

dream of growing psychedelics in my home.

I’d do what everyone else does and buy them from a friend

who grows them in his home, and I certainly wouldn’t stoop

to eating the god-buttons in the concrete hell of the city

when there were real live deer waiting for me to ride them

in the forest just two miles away.

For an entire year Debbie O’Doyle watched me

like a detective hawk, screeching as if I were the one

with the claws and she were the one with the puncture wounds

in the ever-bleeding skull of her solitude.

Andrea! That BBQ of yours

better be over by 9PM sharp!

Andrea! Your dandelions

aren’t going to weed themselves!

Andrea! If you try to pretend that roof

is a party deck one more time . . . !

Andrea. Andrea. Andrea!

I had no idea how she knew my name.

Introductions don’t happen from opposite sides of a street,

and Debbie refused to cross the road. Spent the entirety

of her days pacing the end of her driveway, begging me

to take one step out of the house so she could belt, Andrea!

Your theater friends stole my ornamental toad!

The only thing I ever remember speaking to Debbie O’Doyle

was, They aren’t theater friends! They are poet friends!