I don’t feel like I exist
I feel like coffee
The liquid form
Made while you rush around
And stare into the mirror
at your own invisibility

Your towels smell like college
When you should smell like an open window
Your towels smell like a confessional
When you should smell like the video you took of yourself
and all of your wrinkled posters curl a little at the corners
because college

You can touch your mirror face
but it doesn’t feel like your skin
it doesn’t smell like your towel
it is a mirror
it would feel the same
reflecting nothing at all

I reflect like you do
I use telephones to make people worried
Like you do
I sit by open windows and watch clouds form
like you do
I take shelter like you do too

there is no empty seat between us
this means something in a darkened theater
when there are plenty of open spaces
and famous faces clutch their tickets outside
waiting for the next show

I’m not sure
but out of the corner of my eye
I thought I saw you turn to me
but films play tricks on the mind
whether you watch them or not

on the street
where I took on a shy celebrity stride
made confident by the balmy air
and the strangeness of a new neighborhood
I recounted, to you
a moment when you had crossed a street
years ago
to greet me with a jacket on

but it was all about as real
as the pop up parking vendor
who vanished with our money
leaving us with a space
in a bank parking lot for the night

Every movie is the same
as when I leave my house
for an adult responsibility
and I end up in a hotel room mainlining heroin
Back to the Future is especially like that

Hey let’s stop some Libyan terrorists Marty
Oh fuck he’s shooting heroin and Doc is dead
Or, Hey let’s go to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance
Oops shooting heroin in a high school bathroom and your mom is dead
Or, Hey Marty hop in the Delorean and let’s go back to the future
Oh shit you’re shooting heroin nevermind