You Will Be Alone With The Gods

Don’t worry about rejection, Taylor.

I have been rejected before,

But it isn’t the poetry that makes

The nights cold as winter under the sheets,

Or makes the girls with mouths like roses,

With bodies like sunset,

With bodies like thunder,

Stop knocking on your door.

Don’t worry, Taylor.

I have smoked twenty five cigarettes tonight,

And you saw all the beer.

The whiskey sets my soul furiously ablaze,

But it’s not the poetry that mutes the phone:

It’s the stale fluctuating factors,

It’s a text from an old lover,

It’s a broken shoelace,

It’s a hangnail,

It’s a psychologist scribbling on paper.

Meanwhile,

The phone has only rung once:

Wrong number.

Robert D. Lyons has absolutely no clue where his life is going…