You know you’re an introvert if the word party
makes you think of sitting in your car
wondering if you should go in
or lifting your hand to knock on a door
and turning around. How often I’ve wished
humans had anal scent glands
and just sniffed each other’s butts
and knew pretty much in that moment
if they liked each other, then wagged
or barked and moved on to chasing sticks.
Well actually just the one time in this poem
but I like the idea enough to apply for a patent.
It doesn’t help to imagine people naked
and tattooed with Marie Antoinette’s nipples
or to think that everyone is thinking
everyone is staring at them
or to postulate that shyness
is narcissism minus the ambition
to rule the world. I’m happiest alone in a room
writing poems, though not usually poems
about being alone in a room writing poems,
and will grant you that staring into the mirror
of language every day is the shortest
and most honest résumé I’ve ever written.
Turns out I look exactly like the wind
and have the same address, and feel most days
like a tumbleweed staring at a map.
I know. I mixed metaphors and can’t possibly
be the wind and what the wind pushes around.
I can only impossibly be those things
for another twenty or thirty years
according to actuarial tables, which look lonely
without actuarial chairs.