Lol poetry

I dwell in the esoteric.

They'll never find me here.

Three weeks ago

I held up my hands to my reflection

Showed it that

my knuckles were raw and cracked

"How can that be?" I asked it.

"I use lotion."

This morning,

my reflection shouted back:

IT'S BECAUSE YOU CHEW THEM.

And I could not tell if it was I

Or some character in a story

Who was relieved by this revelation

of oral fixation

and is it self-recognition

Or divine inspiration?

This compulsion to chew:

When people borrow my pens

I pre-empt their disgust

"I'm sorry, I chew,"

and I feel disgusted for them

Even as they take my ruined implements

and say "thank you"

and

"It's okay"

and

take notes on

the late cretaceous.

I feel connected to Paranthropus

That ancient relative

whose skull looks more

gorilla

than human

Thet call him

"hyper-robust"

and I memorize teeth sizes

jaw widths

sagittal crests

And I feel connected

because he got that way

through thousands of years

of being compelled

to chew.

Verbal sketching

I imagined I became a mole person

And strung up my hammock

between pylons

In an old abandoned subway station.

And every night, the other runaway kids

and me

lie awake and listen

to the sound of

sewer rats mating.

I imagined I rode the trains

all night long

right down to the place where

they turn around

in that old abandoned station

with the jewel-tone tiles

in the roof.

And it's all so pretty,

so pretty,

so pretty,

And it's all so clean,

so clean,

so clean,

because

they never let anyone in.

I wanted to ask you,

Have you ever had one of those days

Where you're tired, and you haven't really managed to accomplish anything

And you have so much to do

That you don't know where to begin?

And when you get online

The only people who talk to you

Are the people you really

Just don't have the time for

Or just don't want to talk to

At all?

I even typed the question up

All nice

And pretty

And grammatically correct.

But I didn't hit send

Because I figured you'd probably say,

"I'm having one right now."

And no one wants to know

That their hunch was right

And they really are the person

That no one wants to talk to.