Oceanside Real Estate

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.
At work, I’m exhausted.
At home, I cannot sleep.
I’m simply drifting.

Its been some time since I’ve ordered a,
“Scotch. Cheap scotch. In fact,
make it a double.”
Brings me back to those Rochester days
where I, nonetheless, was drifting.
But at least there I could drift
and could simply wonder
where I would drift to
instead of how I can get back to
the mighty Genesee.

My parents, they don’t really get it.
They know I want it
and for them that is enough
and I love them desperately
for allowing me that kind of assertion,
but they don’t really understand why.

Only once, my mom, only once she asked me,
“Why, Christopher, why do you have such a need?
Why do you long so much for here?
Does it make you so happy?”
The only words I could materialize to help her see,
in her words, in her mind, in her justifications,
were that, no – being there alone does not make me happy.
But what makes it different is that
there
it’s okay for me to not be happy.

I suppose, in the interest of fairness,
that I should state that I write this
sitting on the edge of the Atlantic
at the end of November,
outside,
in Florida.

“There are much worse places to be,”
people, they say to me
and they are absolutely correct,
but it is not that city upon the hill.

But here it is.
I’m coughing.
I’m hurting.
I have to keep telling myself
to breathe.
to keep my heart beating.
I can’t wake in the morning
to face another day.
I merely float out of bed
like a lead weight
and somehow drag myself to work
with the sun coming up in my eyes
and stay there
until I drive home
with the sun going down in my eyes.
I’m losing that passion I once had so much of
that I could pass it to the masses.
When just that little shimmer,
that, “oh wow,” moment made it all worthwhile.

I haven’t seen one of those in so long.
You could pay me in those moments.
I’d find a way to eat.

But now, now it seems
that I have absolutely nothing left
but mere existence.
That my mortal coil has begun to breakdown on me.
That my body has opened up
the Rhineland campaign.

Would I rather be outside,
in Rochester,
on the edge of Ontario
at the end of November?
“That is one of those worse places to be,”
people, they say to me,
and they are absolutely correct,
but I’d rather be haunting
I-390
screaming at the top of my lungs
to whatever I’m playing through the stereo
or screaming down 490
haunting the culver exit
on the way to the east end.

I’ll take those moments over
most anything else.