Club 2718

Because I don’t have the juice or enough gold anything to enter, a room that occasionally exists inside of me is the poorly lit dance floor of Club 2718. Thirst is a way of knowing, not knowing. I was on a gin fueled hunt for big asses and music I could cry to. A woman almost twice my age asks where I’ve been and she shuts the door. Like any american what haunts me is my addiction to private property, not time or blackness. I want to love no one in particular the way I say I love my woman when she’s in the doorway and mad at me. There were days I believed my grandfather owned my grandmother kept her overfed and out of the sun in the back room. Occasionally a room exists inside of me where Johnny Hartman & John Coltrane’s “One and Only Love” plays on repeat. On repeat too is a video of my grandfather dancing a limber legged shuffle and singing across the wall to my grandmother. To love like him is to be a student of regret. To abide by regret is to watch grief turn to ecstasy. I wept in the winter when I left my woman, I wept in the heat when she came back.