Melancholy Comedy

This one ant, same one, I am positive, Runs up and down my bad arm, In circles, In summertime, And I’ll have to kill it sooner Or the quick ones and the dead tickle What a wrong-sided business we style, Is a for instance. There are old men Waiting to be fed by the young, However they can get it.

The guy I tell myself I like has been driving me around in his mom’s minivan since the fall term, explaining how badly he wants to live on a root-vegetable farm in Idaho and why it’s not the right time for me to meet his friends, who are all married with one on the way. I suspect he’s a cult-member, and that if I play my cards right, he’ll be asking me to change my name to Martha Marcy May Marlene before another year’s end. He’s wooden and weird, a composite of hip social media presences, the sort of person who takes selfies in front of greenhouses but hasn’t a word for food justice. Honestly, wherever he is and whoever’s lip he’s chomping on now, I just want him to be happy.

I’m twenty-something, and I’m bored to tears. I’m bored of sleeping late because I have nowhere to be during the day, of thinking how maybe I’m eating too much and not getting enough exercise. And they’re not wrong, except as it relates to my bathing habits. And I can write about it with a particular flare all my own.

You can call me crippled so long as you don’t try to kiss me, And go ahead! , a sack full of mismatched-misshapen Buttons and a postcard from Tulsa addressed to one “Marie with the limp~” Romantic that I am, I held that it was meant for me, That I could read between the lines, And by golly! It’s like there’s rot in the Mulberry. And what’s that mean For Marie with the limp, and where do I go from here?