Looking Down

I am about to be twenty-six.

This startles me.

I am standing on a balcony.

I’m hungry.

I’ve decided to eat suicide.

Unfortunately…

The balcony looks up, not down.

I’ve never been on a balcony like this before—
Where you look up at things, instead of down.
It was built during the Terror.
When looking down could cost you your life.

I am about to be twenty-six.

I know everything about the following things:

The Terror.
The Ice Age.
The Life of Mickey Rooney.
Cooking with Oregano.
And the Disney animated film Dumbo.

I know nothing about the following things:

Living without fear.
Loving without feeling numb.
The Life of most of my friends.
And the collected works of Hitchcock and Sills.

What I don’t know shames me.
What I do know seems useless.
What I have in my pocket is a knife.
Which theoretically I could use to commit the suicide I’m hungry for—
But I’m averse to blood and cutting of any kind.
And I wouldn’t want the stars to see me commit such an act.

Jeremy is up there somewhere.

Looking down on me.
Wanting to know why I’m at a party where the guests include tsars
When there aren’t supposed to be any more tsars.
I’m too scared to challenge them, Jeremy.

They wear diamonds in their hair.
Blueberry tarts are being consumed in mass.
My hostess has left her husband and constantly tells me
How lucky I am that you’re dead.

And I say, Why? He wasn’t my husband.
And she says, ignoring what I said
'I miss having a gay couple.'

And I say, Was that us? Were we your gay couple?
I ignore the fact that she refers to us in the same tone
As her dead parakeets and repossessed furniture.

I miss my gay couple.

I tell her we weren’t a couple.
I say we had sex every night
And loved each other fiercely.
Therefore, we were not a couple.

You never cheated.
I never lied about cheating.
It was the perfect arrangement.

And then a giant tugboat ran your yacht over in the harbor.
You died, your wife survived.
I never looked for the irony in that
If there was any.
I simply carried on, and developed an addiction to pornography.
When the porn numbed my libido
I moved on to collecting old coins, stuffed birds, and rare books.

Funny thing…

You can’t spend the coins.
The birds give you the creeps.
And the books aren’t collected based on any real merit.
Quality isn’t a factor.
Just quantity.

And loving those things is like going to a party
Where you hate everyone.
You go because hating being there
Will take your mind off not being wanted anywhere else.
And you stand out on the balcony and listen to the people inside
Talk about you.

How thin you’ve gotten.
How bad you look.
He never really loved him, they say.

Are they referring to you not loving me
Or me not loving you?

Could they be right?

About…either…?

The hostess has us all crammed into her new basement apartment.
And we don’t discuss her bankruptcy.
We don’t talk about her new friends, the tsars.
We ignore the man who walks around naked—
We’re assuming he’s a performance artist.

None of us are chatting about what we’d like to chat about.

And we all watch the door
In the hopes that someone interesting will walk in
And save us all from each other.

I secretly keep wondering if you’ll walk in.
Saying the tugboat disaster was a hoax.
Something regarding life insurance.
Plotted with your wife.
Enough time gone by to let suspicion die down.
Sorry darling, you’d say, couldn’t tell you.
You understand.

And I would.

I have to hand it to the hostess.
Not many basement apartments come with balconies.
Perhaps they’re hoping the tenants will be inspired.
Let them step out of their crummy little existences.
And gaze up at glowing possibilities.

Yes, the stars may be planes.
The real stars shrouded over by city light.
Still, wouldn’t a star that could move
Be an improvement?

I am about to be twenty-six.

Nobody knows that except me.
And you, Jeremy.
You would have remembered.
You would have refused to let me go to this party.

A party thrown by the hostess in France, you’d say.
Not even in the good part of France?
Oh, no, you'd say
No, no, no, no, no.
Until I would laugh and say—
Fine, fine, Jeremy, where do you want to go?

And you’d say London.
And I’d say New York.
And we’d meet somewhere in the middle of the ocean.
On a large ocean liner
Between those two places and us.

And we’d dance on the deck.
And we’d sip our champagne.
And look down on the ocean.
Never thinking it could rise up
And swallow us whole.