You’ve Come This Far to Be No One
by Samuel J Fox
& its November again shimmering in rusted yellow and crimson the shadows elongating like the hours spent lonesome and afraid of losing what little you’ve earned you’ve slept like a rodent under the I-440 overpass you’ve laid your head on the Waffle House table slept in its booth like a corpse for two hours before being resurrected and forced to walk into the cold dawn pink and open like a wound you’ve traded your dreams for: the instant gratification to survive another day
& you don’t believe you’ve used a day of the education you’re in debt because of and you don’t believe it was ever a gilded ticket to anywhere anymore & you read the paper at a grungy nicotine stained table outside of an ashy, high traffic coffee shop and see that every human running for public office has been or will be compromised the day passes like a hangover and when twilight disrobes into darkness the moon is a villain’s grin the city you love for its grit and moxy now spits on your shoes, blackens your eye
& suicide has always been an option not a hotel room, checking in and then checking out but a dwelling space for the fear you feed like an angelic stranger entertaining it with affection like watering a garden of weeds & the more you feel lost in a darkness of your own needle-craft you swaddle yourself in it hoping for comfort but disillusioned into numbness
& speaking of no-sensation you say her name and feel nothing anymore you might as well be dead to her you change your clothes three times a day hoping to not be so noticeable to escape familiar gazes judgement or maybe even more justice & you are on fire not for life but to scrape by to be able to imagine one day feeling joy again storing up tiny happiness here and there like a magpie fascinated by the way a trinket flashes under sunlight
& the hope you once believed in is faded like an ancient dogeared book you’ve exhausted your treasures of friendship of love of anything but this: your predicament where even the thought of death sounds like sleep sounds like rest sounds like a promise because it is just not one you expect to fulfill this soon returning your breath to the trees like a jilted regifting
& pity is something only the living do & so you throw away sorrow to retrieve the gods of reckless love from the coffins you nailed them in knowing, still, they won’t be able to save you and the rain outside the window knocks like a jilted bride and you go outside with a glass of whiskey and let it have you you shave your head, your beard, your chest until you are unrecognizable just another buoy in a sea of faces longing to be lighthouses near a shore where what washes up sometimes survives but never thrives long before mankind has its way with it or not
Samuel J Fox is a non-binary, queer poet and essayist living in Raleigh, NC. They/He is poetry editor at Bending Genres, a Creative Nonfiction reader for Homology Lit, and frequent columnist/reviewer for Five 2 One Magazine. They/He appears in multiple online and print publications as well as coffee shops, dilapidated places, and graveyards depending. Find Them/Him on Twitter (@samueljfox).