Me, Remembered as a Totem Pole

I am shivering in a necktie

I am swallowing something cold & slippery

I am watching you

walk among the artichokes

so alone

so alone
it's awful

I am standing before a mirror

with a flashlight under my chin

flicking it on & off

on & off

scaring myself 

I am telling myself I can’t take it anymore

I am breaking plates 

on a concrete floor

dropping them one after another
from a long way off—

I don’t know why

I have lost my car keys

I am brushing my teeth with a plastic razor

I am sitting in a small blue boat
far out at sea
in rocky water

No, I'm sitting in a small blue boat
in the middle of my kitchen floor
that buckles beneath me
like rocky water

There is an oar in my hands but it's useless
it is not even an oar
it's the first line of this poem

I don’t know where the cat goes in the night

what she’s hunting

or if she ever finds it

but when she comes for me in the morning 

she always seems surprised to see I’m still here

& indicates 
I should be, too

I've stopped waiting for the planes overhead
the ladder to drop
the trap door to open
the clowns, the dancing pomeranians

This is what is called surviving
This is the easy part

The problem is how do you survive
all the continual surviving?

It's a lot like giving up hope
Hope itself, I mean 
is packing a suitcase like a parachute
& walking out the door 
into loneliness 
into space

You'll see.
It all tastes like cherries in the end.