Naked (2025)

I write a poem on how you look lately

Its blasé and boring and I can’t be bothered

To look your way is to live nude again, live martyred

And to live plainly 

In April I saw you cry and I danced alone

Beneath a darkened chandelier

Feet stumbling and eyes waxing, more from fatigue than drink

When I leaned across the baby grand, my thoughts became clear

But then I thought and thought ‘til there was nothing to think

I find the bars that look most holy

So I can sit with gin and sit with tonic

And martyr the saints in the Atlantic

So when I come home and you hold me closely

You won’t catch a whiff of cigarette or martini

To look your way is to live nude again

When those vile moments pass me, I weep in the kitchen

But there’s no nakedness to this linoleum

And I am just a child who wants to be held again

Life is so real that I tremble

Live so real, so tainted.

Life so pure and sainted. 

You now sit in your walls of quiet ivy

But I am a lonely girl, and I am not so lively

My smoke and ink I hold in night

My pupils with you in view spin from loose to tight

I am so drunk in this kitchen

I am so in love with my pastimes, my soon oblivions

I sit in bars that feel quite holy

And I spill to strangers my dirty stories

Because to sit with gin and sit with tonic

Means to let your tone become moronic

Mama drinks her lavender wine

While I go and stay out all night

I don’t return for the suns rise

I lay in a field and wait to cry

Won’t you say your name again?

No, it's not forgotten. I just like the way it's said. 

To look your way is to live nude again

The dog laps at my tears spilled in the kitchen

While I think about chosen nakedness

The thought gives me the bends

In my pulse there lies a conviction of

These drinks, these saintly strangers, all my benedictions

Your soft tone starts to cut with infliction

But I dance, swaying in the kitchen

Bitchy waitresses and line cooks look my way

They see a woman hiding in indigo, a sky-eyed girl, a blue jay

I tell them that “I’d like this to go-

I must hurry to write my life in prose”

I am a lucky girl to know such glory

While I sip on gin I think of how lovely

to be a stranger in a bar with a story

And I think, this must be it, this must be fate, surely