If You Could Live In Any Time

What’d it be?        I’d retreat
to the moment before
you asked me this waste of a question
             you insipient lout, I’d escape 
      doldrums of hypothetical small talk
            & research the optimal volume
      to fill a stranger’s bathtub.    
I’d just soak &     regret wetness. 

    Well me I miss 
high school especially
graduation with my friends in our gowns & caps & sunglasses 
my parents were 
              SOOO     p r o u d    of me!
    Isn’t it ridiculous, us
celebrating such inanity? Congratulations 
            making it through 4+ years of 
unstimulating daycare opulent with false history 
         without getting in a car crash or
dying some other predictable teenage varietal death. 


         I’d like to go to England 
during Jack the Ripper’s spree    I love
Halloween & it’d be        so scary! Yeah & you’d 
get fucking murdered or 
              die from a goddamn rotten fish or
        smallpox have you ever even looked at
  pictures of smallpox victims?    You take heavily for granted
               water already, let’s start
there, with water. How would you get clean water to
        bathe or even drink. Think more clearly
                       of this dismal conversation. 

I want to learn how to 
not be a shitty conversationalist & 
a rampant asshole during any given occasion. 

How does one smile at another
when they speak? How do you not
lash out at them, pessimism & general disinterest, if not
                falsely projected vindication? 

            My ex put a note on her mirror saying 
I am enough         even recognizing the cliché of it by god yet believing,
    that's a golden form of lovely, a ghost flower undying;
        on my mirror I wrote with sharpie I am 
the blood         
dripping from the ceiling 
        post buckshot exit wound.            There are so many ways
to live wrong, & the smallnesses of heart falter. 

I am begging somebody smiling to ask me that question again,
I am begging for a way to not attack. Because I’ve heard of the times of Liberalia 
              where Romans would march a giant sculpted dick throughout the fields
        which would somehow bless the crops for fertility (I get that in a sense)
      while also warding off evil (seems counterintuitive but I like the gist) & then at the end,
after parading this massive hog about cheering gleefully
for stuffed stomach’s & mouths & assholes & vaginas to come
                a lauded matron decorates the dick 
          with an ornate wreathe & I can see you & I & all of your friends & my few too 
applauding, dancing, drinking & fingering each other in this 
       jovial soft-core orgy & when anyone asked me anything
        I would smile at them 
        & give them an answer in joy, I would say my favorite time
                   is this time we share in revelry
but in reality I met my friend’s new girlfriend he really digs last night
        & shutting the door she said Well,
he's just rude & I sat in my car looking at a pine tree 
disappointed in agreement.