Numbers Game

Someone said I’m drinking
I noticed
You wanted to hide things
Starting with the Russians and the haircut
The radiant pain
Powder blue guitar you leave on the street
While you pee
I know tomorrow will be spent in tears
At 2 PM you’ll sleep while I clean
And that is what happened
Am I the only happy person
It can be lonely
Outside the ambient sadness
Where I pin sadness to its source
Making it irrelevant
I am afraid I’ll give everything away
An instant later afraid you’d forget I told you
A fear I could just barely say
I think I’ve said it twice
When I meant it like this
And I’ve done it once all the way
And you did forget
So I’ll say it a third time at some later date
When you’re feeling better
You smoke weed and mourn
The same impossible standards that made you
Accept whiskey from the Russian barber
Wanting proof you deserve to be alive
Are the ones that are a little hard to talk about
Because they’re the same ones that made me
Give everything away that one time
And how I’ve gathered up only about fifty percent of it
So when I say everything I mean half
I’m afraid I will give away this half
And afraid of how the half that remains missing
Might be operating somewhere in the world

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Courtney Bush is a writer and filmmaker from Mississippi. She is the author of the chapbook Isn’t This Nice? (blush_lit, 2019). Her poems have recently appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Flag+Void, and Peach Mag.