the guilt, but mostly the metabolization of the night keeps me awake. rain, and soft, wet air, patters on the windowsill & street accompany me.

i carve through the porky dead flesh of recent memory with a scalpel in my mind, looking for a granule of something; clasp a closed hand to my left breast, find a crumpled love note that i want to unfold and flatten on my chest, so i do.

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over work drinks, i tell my colleagues that my best friend is getting married this weekend, and the cheeky one accuses me of being Julia Roberts in some film, secretly in love with my best friend, so i roll my eyes, because cheeky co-workers are like drunk people playing darts at a bar together, and you know how films like that go, if you keep watching.

the art director tagged my name in silver on my favorite midnight street; so young, so young, all the bars & streets are adventures when the city is a ghost town on a gorgeous night at 3something. we kept it consistent, tully neats, many, because the rise of the other irish whiskeys, is just a decade's worth of subway marketing coming to fruition. when we are old, they will say that only old men drink jamesons, because the young will be drinking something else.

i've got a silver ring on a black thread. what's it signify? a silvery fancy that caught my eye on a saturday afternoon. i've got my third tungsten replacement sitting in the bottom of my book bag. a pretty aging thing wore too many diamonds, dangling from two symmetrical holes in her lobes, a tiara, because all gold-diggers are princesses, a cuff, a collar, and so many rings, except for the commitment ones. she mostly ignored her slightly sleazy, ugly, beta-y, significantly older date. i bet she tells him that she's old-fashioned and likes to be treated like lady, and is wide-eyed & girlish at all compressed carbons.

as a child, when patrons came in, and i'd be doodling or doing my math homework or sometimes reading the paper, because intelligent children occasionally like to read expensive rags, i'd suggest the pink ones, because regular ones were boring. when did shiny cut & polished crystals begin to signify love?

love is a poem. love is fiction. love is creativity. love is not roses, but a bouquet that i deconstructed, into a richly-colored blossom, left on every lonely parking meter, or bench, or closed shop door, for the first stranger to claim it.