Praise this frustration. Praise a life without
an ounce of erotic hope. Praise the minus,
the loss, the single bed. Praise all the doubts

that make us sleep alone. Praise the daftness
that says the next world has to be better.
Anything than this, please. Praise the ones

who believe it; that our life-long quirks, our
foul habits, will somehow get us lovers.
At the end of each open mic. I’d ask

the audience, “how many of you are
in good, stable relationships?” and you’d
get a smattering hands. “Yeah, well, we

hate you. This last poem isn’t for you.”
But when I asked who had just gotten dumped,
broken up, slept alone, separated,

divorced, torn asunder by howling wolves,
lost in splitsville, terminated, fucker,
almost always half of the crowd would cheer.

“Yeah, cheers, this is for you, it’s a haiku:
‘Tonight we’re lucky/ you’re coming back to
my place/ we’re all getting laid.’” And like that

the show would be over, the crowd would up
and leave and you could see, even seconds
after the offer, that everybody

was justifying in their heads why it
must be a jape, a joke, performance art
anything other than what it really

was — offering you something new tonight.
Just one night, out you’re entire life,
where all you had to do was show interest,

some spark, that dull Prometheus damage,
and you’d lift the hex, the curse, whatever
it was that kept you from being happy,

from making that fairy tale you keep up
in your skull-bone come true; if misery
is the only shared language that we know

then praise the odd, the twitchy, the outcasts,
fools who ruin their own love, misfits all.
Praise everything that keeps us from this joy.

][][

“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.” — Agent Smith, The Matrix (1999)