Image from the 1966 film.
I'm 23 and it's Tuesday.
I have a heavy ache in my frontal lobe
Holding my small head in a veiny fist of tension.
My eyes burn from the unrelenting sun
Cast through the tall corporate window,
Melting the chemical mascara
From wire lashes into dry eyes.
I can feel the irritated zit pulsating,
Cracking under makeup like a dried scab
Sealed ineffectively from the light of gaze.
I'm 23 and it's Tuesday.
I hold a soft plastic cup
Half filled with $7 beer
Half with concealing foam.
I listen to my dad's favorite songs
In an anachronistic bar in Brooklyn.
It smells of sticky liquor and white candles.
The bar designed as a cave,
Oliver Twist's windowless pub
upgraded with wifi and flat-screams,
2D images of naked legs.
There are no gentlemen,
Only boys wearing vintage T-shirts and woollen beanies.
There are no women,
Only girls wearing thick hair and a nervous bounce.
I'm surprisingly unselfconscious.
Surprising because I'm 23 and it's Tuesday.
Youths cram in, bodies invading the line
I draw between myself and the outside world.
A line I imagine as pillows and erect as paper.
The bass starts to disrupt the balance of the room,
Flickering the white candles and rocking the legs of my chair.
The foam of my beer sinks into a thin film,
Concealing the yellow liquid
Like a bald spot conceals stretchy skull skin.
The noises are loud.
The music no longer my dad's.
The stack of plastic cups dwindles.
The well builds a mucus of liquor, soda and foam.
I'm 23 and it's Tuesday
I'm anxious.
I'm 23 and its Tuesday.
My skin is thin glass
Immovable
Impatiently waiting to shatter.
I'm 23 and it's Tuesday
I have a tint in my blood.
Maybe it's only hued from youth,
But it feels innately, timelessly a part of me.
It's an energy drink.
A propellant.
Pushing me to create, to care, to move, to desire.
I'm 23 and its Tuesday