David Colodney
I’m black and white, I’m an 8-track left over after a garage sale that couldn’t be sold
for a dime, I’m sitting at a desk writing on an old typer
with a sticky Q key, listening to an old Dylan record on vinyl,
thinking I haven’t heard from my buddy Matthew in weeks,
remembering he’s off getting married,
married in Thailand,
wishing I could be there
the world marble-small for guys like him. We root for new couples,
we admire old ones, we mourn the couples in-between, stumbling
Novocain-numb thru life, trying to figure out if they’re sad or not on a therapist’s
couch or a bartender’s stool.
I’m lamenting my friend now in a country I couldn’t find on a map.
I’m drinking Sierra Nevada beers, the same kind he and Scott and I drank
last summer, talking about Kim Addonizio and Denis Johnson at 3 am,
in a room lit mostly by lamppost glow from the street outside.
I’m snapped out of reverie when my ex-wife calls.
I’m foundling ambivalent, these conversations always end in second guessing,
they loom fog heavy, me yellowing like an old photo
of Frank O’Hara, and like him,
I’m thinking about my failed relationships
just as Matt starts a new life in one. Maybe I should have gotten married
on foreign soil because marriage itself is such alien terrain.