I can’t commit to anything
because it’s unclear in this political climate
if I’ll live through the week
Not to be morose, but
I am a millennial and we’re mostly at the age now
where we’re in charge of stuff while
also drinking ourselves to death
whether or not we are alcoholics; we know about the lead pipes, my dude
and our jokes end in punchlines like
“health insurance” It’s not that I don’t fall in love, it’s just that
I’m realistic about how we’re all
digging holes with our fingers and our teeth
Like, who gets married anymore
when we can just fuck each other senseless
and get drunk and cry
in parking garage construction sites
at 3 am
And show up to the Food Not Bombs meeting
hungover and still disenchanted but
doing it anyway
because fighting to feed somebody is still better
than staying in bed We’re old enough now that
our dads have dementia and we’re
preparing to bury our parents
while we suck down American Spirits and wonder
if there will be any room to bury anybody
by the time we are dead
No wonder we all escape to brunch
with the money we should have spent on bills,
saturated with
our own morality We are all 35 and sick
but we can’t call in
to any of our three jobs, we are so lazy
I don’t even know where my bootstraps are anymore,
I think I sold them. Yes, I’m going to fall in love with you
and it will be dystopian as hell
It’ll feel like a Paul Auster novel,
just us collecting garbage
and trading it for other garbage
We can write poems about our daddy issues
and the starving polar bears
and say in the morning, “I can’t like, *be* with anybody, you know, I’m working on myself,”
and then text at bar close, “wyd”, which means
“I need you to sleep next to me
I am scared to live in the world
If we try very hard
we can drown out the sirens outside
Don’t tell me that’s not romantic I saw you on Instagram looking perfect, I thought, “good for you”,
because I know nobody is okay and
you should be allowed to curate your own story
so that something can be pristine
It’s why I only call you after dark
and send relatable memes
It’s because we’re out of words
with mouths full of poison
about to hand our kids a world with no bananas
and no bees
and we are still trying to find ways to
touch each other any way we can
To hold each other tightly even
for brief moments in falling apart houses
with no way out
We are still kissing each other’s fingertips
while we slowly just
get sicker
Of course I love you Yesterday a boomer told me we don’t know about love
anymore, I said,
You jokers made that Titanic movie and you
can’t recognize a whole generation of
hopeless romantics
falling head first in love
on a sinking ship? There has got to be
a meme for this.