late night TV on your phone, infomercial after ad as you scroll your feeds,

martinis, with a twist, one, two, netherland vodka because it's so good and clean,

the undesirable waft of your neighbor's smoke, cigarettes, sometimes weed, but the evening breeze is so needed in november.

insomnia is a familiar thing, like sleeping in your ex's bed, or laying awake with all the things that clog your mind.

poetry is not a diary, but what if I don't have enough story for a film? what if all I want are distilled photos of people in solitude, in the night, or in some alleyway at least.

well, that's a lie. sometimes i want to see that intimacy, proof that love exists in the little moments, all imperfect, like lovers tangled in their sleep through a window.

i want to be in the room where those looks exchange. why watch movies when you can watch people talk? is this voyeurism? no, i don't want to see them fuck. i want to see their souls when they shed their skins, put these feels in a globe where i can shake the snow and relive these things that matter.

my boss once said that being a bartender was like being on a stage; you perform for your customers, and give them what they want, but I don't think that's entirely right. I think the bar is a room, and the room is the stage for everyone else; you're just nudging the party to where it really wants to be.

Sheets, a disarray of white paper; smudged acrylic; the sun pours down from the boxy window in my ceiling, and I think of Dakota who comes in late on Sunday evenings. Her laugh came easy. Her hair were waves of somewhere between red and brunette, a little more than shoulder length; her curves were amazing, neither too extreme in a porn way, or too small and lean against her bones, and her tits were perfect. Her laughter was easy as the way she missed an old friend. She was always last to leave because she liked to say warm goodbyes, and then she would say goodbye to the space herself, like a slow regathering of her bits of soul left in a booth, or by her early-on abandoned seat, or in the lights on the bar counter. She'd enjoy her last smile in the afterglow, and in the cooling of the night. And then she would take herself home.

-

A moth kissed my arm; I was startled.

On Fridays, I used to dance all night. Crowds of skinny bodies and fog machines, and caffeine and shots of hard, showy liquor in my blood. The strobe lights flickering and fading in the hands of some automated algorithm or technician. Stranger after stranger, these bodies. Substances in almost everyone, some to dull, and some to heighten. How do you even remember the people you touch lips with, when nobody intends to go home? Did you even kiss, when there was no intimacy or connection, or even memory?

A boy I met around this time, told me that he slept with 55 people, and now I am his age.
I have not done this, but I don't think it matters. I don't think it is as hard to touch bodies with a stranger. Sex is easy; we have drives. Intimacy is the elusive pursuit.

There was another boy who went sometimes with me when we chased strangers and bodies and maybe something new to pass the time. Sometimes something promising would happen, like the passing interest of an attractive stranger. Most nights, there was nobody quite right. There was never enough drink to quite balance out that thing that weighed a person down, and then there was all at once too much, so he'd get us home, and let me sleep on his shoulder during the long rides.