About two months ago I reached a breaking point
and left my job while walking to Starbucks with my boss,
and a week later
I was in South Dakota, sleeping in a tent in the Black Hills,
in a holler where General Custer once slept, nestled
between pines.
The old job was in New York City, working on contracts with
Goldman Sachs and hedge funds, making a bunch of dirty money.
Now I work the closing shift at a local coffee shop.
The pay isn’t so good.
But tonight I made a bunch of cash in tips and talked
to three long-time-no-see friends, and mopped floors
and scrubbed shit off of a toilet seat, and scrubbed
red velvet truffle cake out the stone floor with a broken
mop head, and drank an employee-discounted whiskey,
and turned up the Nirvana song, thinking about my dog.
By the time I arrived home I had been drinking coffee
for five hours and hadn’t had anything to eat in ten.
Soon it’s four in the morning and I have written four
poems. Soon I will become dizzy and quit.
Outside the window, there are stars, clear.
The moon is stuck between liquid crystals,
sapphire drowning a sea of mud.
THE FILTERED PRESS 