The heat wave was swallowing the eastern half
of the country, and Facebook was flush with statuses
begging for winter, thunderstorms to clear the air.
The same people who spent all winter complaining
about the cold. I shut up. Didn’t speak, didn’t click
the “Like” button, provide comment, or criticism.
Except at night, my body a black car in the sun,
unmoving, I felt myself getting fat - The heat
playing tricks with my mind. Someone told me once,
“You’ll never fall asleep next to girls who are
sometimes mistaken for models, unless
you have some kind of workout routine.”
So I roll onto the floor, catch my breath;
do push-ups, fifty of them. The same
person said, “You’ll be that guy in a strip club
in some dead-end town staring into the bottom
of your mug wondering what could have been.
How you let it all slip through your fingers.
You don’t want to be that guy, do you?”
I want to be happy, so I add sit-ups into
my routine, and crawl into bed, or onto
the couch and wait for girls to enter through
the unlocked front door and press their cold feet
against my humid legs, laughing when they tell me:
Guess who someone mistook me for today?
You don’t know? Come on, just guess. Take one guess.
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