The Song of Tobias in a Quarter-Life Crisis

Armed with only a diploma, empty pockets, and a dog,

I leave college and my parents for an economic drought.

I drained my money and perception in a beer-induced fog,

without a woman or a job, without housing—just without.

Neither married nor ordained and now too old to be a child,

between animal and angel, I adventure through the wild.

I keep hoping that a healer spirit guides me through the murk

of self-pity and entitlement and middle-class malaise,

through the internet fantasias where the Facebook phantoms lurk,

through my English-major dreams and theories fading into haze.

Neither married nor ordained and now too old to be a child,

between animal and angel, I adventure through the wild.

I suffer synesthesia

in the sensory barrage

of a world with amnesia,

chasing each perfumed mirage,

each sweet girl I could seduce,

but all the girls I’ve wanted

run away, so I deduce

they’re surely demon-haunted.

Neither married nor ordained and now too old to be a child,

between animal and angel, I adventure through the wild.

The Departure of Tobias by Giovanni Antonio Guardi

Communion

Come,

please come along,

I am racing back to sleep,

far from the ghost-drenched circles

that streetlights pour across the sidewalks.

Those orange islands will expand with the dawn’s light

until they reunite and blanket the road, the campus, and distant home.

For now, we lie touching in spots, cut from communion and distraction

by the margins of night swelling between the windows.

The spent burst of twilight retreats into streaks.

The rhythms of our breathing

slow down and

diverge

in

approach

of the border,

the boundary between

wakefulness and dreamless sleep

that hides from sight like the bridge between eyes.

Each as an eye, we cannot glimpse each other over that space,

but our distance lets us sense the depth that yawns between us and our object.