bare

Montréal, April 27, 2025

Wet dreams of you and me. Weight on my lap when I wake up alone. Melancholy diffuses over a day walking around in the rain. Like smoke settling in the walls. A whole city born of just enough. Kiss like remembering last night’s dream. Kiss like right before sleep. That moment between. Looks like Road Runner painted another sunset on a wall. Cartoon tunnel. Wondering if it’s worse to collide or worse if it just goes on forever. New note: remember the dream. Start a journal. Run out of ink in your pen. Kiss and then decide. Wrong decision.

I’ve been alone for a few months now, feeling out the end of the world. It’s a wet spring. The sun comes out just before it sets. Everything is ironic like that right now. I stopped masturbating because it made me sad. I spend at least four hours a day playing Skyrim. I think for a moment I’m living in the past, and then I try to remember it. Like a dream. Like remembering a dream. Lifetime déjà vu.

My roommates smoke weed and watch hockey. I curl into a little ball in the corner of the couch and clutch a bottle. Sometimes I drink enough to throw up. Sometimes I don’t drink and throw up anyways. I’ve been waking up at noon and counting dust in the air, something I imagine doing with you.

We met in the windowsill at some party three years ago. Your crooked smile told me something about your beauty. It took me six months to realize there’s no difference between desire and love. Love seems to be the thing you realize after you stop having what you want. It’s that remainder. The residue of loss. Like how I knew I loved my grandfather after he died. His records are all warped, a result of poor transport. I can’t take care of anything. All my plants die within a couple weeks. I’ll go months without a haircut. Drink the same stale coffee grounds for weeks. I always forget to click “Save” in Skyrim before it's too late. I’ve been giving everything away. Thousands of dollars of useless shit.

My brother texted me a few weeks ago reminding me of the scar tissue in my heart. He’s sick again. In the way I can’t fix. “Trauma”, says the old lady I chat with in the cafe some mornings. She’s a grandmother now. For the first time. She tells me I’m special. She says I have a special relationship with older women. I agree with the latter. The former is a result of my flattery. My successes are marginal. I do well in school because I was taught at a young age how to read critically. My art is regurgitative. Whatever. I can’t get bogged down too much. My friend’s ex-boyfriend says I have a mission. So I’m on that mission.

My old golf coach took me out on the six seater golf cart onto hole seven when I was about twelve. The sun set real slow over the hills. Grass brown with winter. He asked me what kind of music I liked and I said dubstep. He said that stuff is garbage. That hurt. His daughter was born months premature. He showed me a photo of his wedding band around her torso. She looked like a gummy worm. Some real southern name like “Mary Hart Kinley” or something. He told me to play a song called “Rooster” by Alice in Chains. I was wondering why they put her in chains when the guy started screaming. Fuck yeah. Alice in Chains on the golf course. The track was pitched down a semitone so the SoundCloud copyright bots wouldn’t flag it. Even better. My childhood was filled with moments like that. Things I only remember right before falling asleep.

Thinking about bleeding out. Imagining how that must feel. Getting all that shit out of you. Like sweating out in the sauna, but forever. Dream where we bleed out together. Dream where I say I hate you and then we make out. Crying at videos on my phone until my eyes run dry. Like the phone calls I won’t return. I am not a good person. So let me lay it bare.

Bare. I’ll be old and toothless kicking cans in the parking lot. Bare. I’ll be an amputee spitting black and green. Bare. I’ll take care of my mom when she’s sick. Bare. I’ll be the first to go. Bare. I can’t grieve anymore. Bare. I need more tattoos soon or I’ll forget I’m alive. Bare. I’m alive. Bare. If I die, it’ll be the government who gets me. Bare. I am not suicidal, but I’m not allergic to the idea. Bare. I write for your attention. Bare. I often wonder if I am unlovable. Bare. My friends all hate me. Bare. A doctor once told me I’d be blind by my forties. Bare. I didn’t care that much. Bare. All my favorite people are dead. Bare. Sometimes I jerk off in the bathroom mirror. Bare. The mirror is too high to see anything but my face. Bare. Sometimes I cry. Bare. Usually without tears. Bare. I don’t want to be touched. Bare. I just want to watch.

I think sometimes about the album I wrote over the course of a couple years. “Your Best Days are Behind You”. I meant it. In a sick way, I was right. I used to bum around Emory’s campus with my proto-frat boy friends when I was in middle school. We’d buy bags of candy and energy drinks and climb around abandoned buildings. We sent a brick through a window and threw shit around their old library. The sun set huge over Atlanta, the whole place pink and purple in the summers. I’m crying imagining it. We were set free on the rooftops of that place. A few of them are dead now. The rest have wives. Kids on the way.

I’ll leave Montréal in a couple months. This whole period of my life has been a four year slam poem to an empty bar. Someone will take my bedroom. I wish I could leave a hex on the doorknob. Put asbestos in the walls. I want to scorch this place. Nothing left standing. This city is filled with people commenting on things. I don’t know why they have so many opinions. I can’t keep up. It makes me dizzy sometimes to think of all the things people care about here and how little they actually do about it. I want to ask them what they want from this world. And part of me wants to give that to them. But I can’t. I can’t be the cause you want me to be. I wish you could find peace. You will die soon and leave this world with nothing but bitterness.

I sit at the diner looking at my reflection in the mirrored walls. My chin angles enough to look good. My eyes are the right distance apart. My hair falls alright. I’m handsome. I have to be. But it doesn’t matter, so long as I keep this distance.

I remember when I first moved here, I immediately found myself on five hour long dates in dim bars. Men who liked to talk. Some who liked to listen. We’d hold hands under the table, maybe kiss, and eventually I’d assume an aerial view over us. Two men in the bar. Two men growing tired of ourselves. We’d have sex to blot out the noise. I think about my head under the pillow of my dormitory bed. Some guy with his fingers inside me. Crying and cumming. Muffled by the pillow. It’s sweeter than I make it seem. I read Edmund White, who convinced me to find love in these moments. So I did. And now I’m a few months from 23 with chapters of prose trying to find it. Parsing sex. Lust, something. Burning holes in my skin. Running fast on the mountain. Cemeteries of daydreams. Ugly, ugly paragraphs. Camera roll tracks the four year comedown.

Everyone’s leaving everyone. Nothing good lasts. Just the bad.

Bare. I don’t listen to music anymore. Bare. I’m sick at the thought of leaving this city. Bare. I’m hardly a person. Bare. I can’t make it through a whole movie. Bare. I lie to all my friends. Bare. I’ve been watching a porno called “Bareback apasionado con enorme polla sin cortar”. Bare. It makes me cry. Bare. Porn always makes me cry. Bare. No tears. Bare. My life managing guilt. Bare. Let me give you my life so you have two. Bare. I’d gladly sell my body. Bare. Sometimes I wish I lived in the hospital. Bare. The poem is over. Bare. Last time I slept with a woman I couldn’t cum until I admitted to myself she’d never be you. Bare. Big empty world. Bare. End of the road. Bare. Your skin on my skin. Bare. It hurts until you spit on it. Bare. Tell me I’m worth something. Bare. Look at how the light moves. Bare. Wake up so you can tell me it’ll be ok.