I sit waiting. In comes a mother with an eye that’s swelling shut, her son goes to the desk to check her in. 

I offer her my seat. She takes it. She says something in Chinese and I feel guilty and missing all at once. I should go see my grandma. 

There is an old guy, who grimaces right at me, shamelessly. I think about how few things piss me off more than an old man just staring. And then I think of the power he exudes, even frail and shrivelled. And grow angrier. But then I imagine his lower back really hurts. And maybe I too, if exhausted enough, may no longer be able, to hide the disdain on my face. 

I wake every morning with the sinking feeling that I’ve forgotten something. 

Like I’m late to the appointment, on the sticky note in the trash. 

I’m unemployed and people watching. Eavesdropping with an overpriced beverage (an order my dad would mispronounce on purpose.) I tell myself I’m researching— collecting conversations for the screenplay I have not started.

Yesterday I over heard someone say they’ve “stopped reading poetry altogether

 I just can’t take it seriously!…” 

And I smiled to myself. 

Like I knew a secret I couldn’t tell them. 

Because I know poetry is always seen, as something so unbearably pretentious, always taking itself too seriously. But every poet I know is closer, to a child lost in the mall. 

Scared, unknowing, searching for something.

Easily distracted and affected by their surroundings. 

Poetry is playful. It’s painting with your hands, and skipping while you walk. It’s unkempt and unrestrained. Drunkenly crying in the bathroom, spilling feelings on your new top. Your makeup smeared from the heat of another. The paint that’s chipped (in your childhood room), where your bed hit the wall, (that you left all too soon.)

A something that produces a lump in your throat, a tear in your eye, and you can’t explain what,

but you must at least try.

There’s nothing serious about it at all. 

For the most serious thing someone could do, 

is explain the world in the simplest, plainest, terms.