To Be Held By Someone At Night

Getting up and getting dressed

Is easy enough

Even when the rain

Suggests more pain than gain.

But midway through the third act

When the sun goes on honeymoon

A lack of oxygen

Is noticed between the chest and arms.

It’s an unacknowledged need

To be held by someone at night,

To cap off an empty bottle of time

With the promise of eternal warmth.

Wine and weed and fantasies

Have reached the limit of their placeholder power,

Causing a tingling sensation

Then evaporating like post-shower condensation.

Echoed on the trains and on the sidewalk corners

Where a variety of nobodies

Wait for their shivering bodies

To be held by someone at night.