Because holyshit goodbye.

Goodbye profiles of adorable sweet

and age-appropriate men who turn out to love Jesus. Goodbye Jackson Pollock,

commas.

Goodbye wraparound sunglasses

and carefully tended abs glistening

in some tropical sun. Goodbye, also, tropical sun

(stop reminding me

I haven’t escaped town in an age). Goodbye fake blood,

prosthetic garotting, all-over

face paint (I’m nerdy,

but not like that). Goodbye, “some college,” when

that lack of subject-verb agreement cries out for “more.”



Speaking of my arrogance goodbye to your reading material. Sure,

you might be reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

(“reading” meaning

“keeping close in case your iPhone craps out”),

but I am highly skeptical about Gravity’s Rainbow. (Then again, I never finished

either.) (And really, not a single book written by a woman?)

(But moving on.) Goodbye,

trying to think of a bar I don’t hate

where I also won’t bump into friends.



Goodbye getting dressed,

and getting dressed, and getting dressed again.



Goodbye, finally, to all of you who wrote perfectly nice messages—not crass,

not cut-and-paste twee, not mean, (not funny), just perfectly fucking

polite and decent messages

that conveyed nothing so much as “I am interested in you as a human being,”

which I probably ignored, possibly

unfairly, my fear of being too much to someone more profound, still,

than my wariness of being too little.

Goodbye.



…

(and the silence that followed was rightly filled

with ellipses)