I.
At some point
my insomnia ceased to
contribute to my idea
of myself as a romantic.

II.
I just lie in bed and wonder if there’s enough light coming
in from the window to pick up Dubliners again, or
if I’m trying to forge a connection to that book
because Carson and Bronte had such a good relationship.
I also don’t have a moor handy.
Inevitably it couldn’t have been that good but my mind puts an Instagram filter over everything when I lie in bed trying not to think of her.
She looks happy in her photos.
If Anne Carson and Law had broken up today she would have spent all of her time on Facebook and being miserable.
I just read Carson in hopes of finding a metonymic surrogate for my pain.
Same with Joyce.
I made myself write that.
I’ve gotten so sucked into my own head that the only way I can
relate to anything is by relating to someone else’s relating to someone else’s experience.

III.
I won’t give her a name because I’m as over her as I’ll ever be
plus there’s little doubt that “Law” was a fake name.
She was the first time I was in love, and
it was relatively late, I gather.
Not like the poor boy who gets the lights shut off on him at Araby.
Joyce had a dizzying chasm between how he treated love in Dubliners
and his personal love letters.
It’s impressive.
It’s kind of scary. He probably lay somewhere between drinking menstrual blood
and tenderly crying out his love’s name in the rain.
Either way it gives me hope that there’s still much to experience.
I lie in bed with Anne under my arm as she pulls out hairs on my chest and
I’m not sure if she’s a mother or a lover.
Emily was her sister, of that I can be sure, but everything seems to
fold itself into nothing when we cross gender lines.
The poor boy goes to the bazaar after weeks of existing on his head
and his vanity only dawns upon him standing in the dark in the middle
of a crowd of gypsies.
I know that loneliness.
I want to go get Anne trinkets from the Araby Market
But I know she can’t hear me and my vanity prevents me from going in the first place,
which of course it always does, though when I was with her I would have gone without hesitation.
Something is always lost after the first time.
Yes it’s a story as old as time but these clichés are stubborn and
Universal.
So I lay here, pitifully awake, watching the sun sneak in through my window, thinking of her and silently pulling out my hair.