The apples on my dining table have rotted.
Fruit flies buzz around my sink full of dishes
and the sickly too sweet skin in my fruit bowl,
but I leave the apples and
can’t quite remember if I’ve had one bottle of water or two,
but fuck it, I’ll drink another diet coke, just to feel something.
The laundry is piling up like it pays rent here (real),
and it’s raining outside, and my cat’s scared of thunder
and shit herself before she could get to the litter box.
Her name was Rey when we adopted her (real),
but my wife and I don’t like Star Wars,
so we changed her name to “Rain”,
because we didn’t want to give her an identity crisis
and change her name to something like “Sappho” or “Muffler”.
Now, she freaks out anytime she hears the rain tapping on the roof,
and I think that would give me an identity crisis too.
I don’t know a thing about identity crises (fake),
but I feel guilty that I’ve named my cat after something she hates,
and that I can’t even name the thing inside me, because it’s me,
the me-ness of this feeling is real and present, but in a way I clearly am not.
The Pope died and I’m not even Catholic anymore (real),
But the ivy of that guilt, the strangling sensation on my spine,
tells me that my grief should be more than grief,
and I cry a little when I think about him being disappointed in me,
and my grandpa is dead (real),
and my cat, Bo, is on Prozac (real),
and I’m on Pristiq (real),
and hey, isn’t that funny?
I’ve had Bo for four years, got with my wife,
and we adopted a second cat together
who, remember, we called Rain on accident,
and suddenly the lesbians have a set of cats called Rain Bo (real),
and it makes me laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh
every time I think about being so gay you accidentally have rainbow cats (real),
and then I feel sad about the war in Palestine (real)
and my PMDD and my PTSD and my ADHD and I can’t stop (real) (real) (real) (real),
can’t for one moment sit still and focus and god,
isn’t that funny?
The dyslexic, ADHD-riddled thing getting her degree in English, of all things,
a glutton for punishment, reading Chopin and Faulkner’s letters fuck up (real),
q’s and c’s dancing around the page like fruit flies buzzing around my sink full of dishes,
desperately pleading “here I am! aren’t I real? I exist!”