You Can Never Leave Home Again

Here's my third shot at the second interaction with Anne Carson's Autobiography Of Red. I wanted to steer it well wide of the last one, even though I really liked it. So this is more like some of the early poems in the collection. 

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II. The Journalist Resigns
Adam Stone

​None of our photographs show us the way we wish to be resolved

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The man who lives in
Adam's old
neighborhood wants Adam inside him

His first text
We just don't have men like you
here So sexy What
will you do
with me All this a response to
motel bathroom selfie Recognition of
song lyric in his profile

Adam agrees
to meet him at the motel
It is early still He texts
There is no room
four here The guy at the desk says
rooms start with one hundred

Hotel instead of motel He is
bad with directions and names
Calls Adam andrew when explaining he
forgot condoms and neither of them
looks like the photographs
they both just took an hour ago

I am wearing every inch of road
in this stupid town and
need a shower

He closes the bathroom door
for two minutes Adam
arranges the bed the suitcase his hat
Checks his phone for advice from his future self

Parker he wants to be called
says I have this friend
         You'd like him He wants to
         watch you fuck me

There is not enough room Adam thinks
what with our bodies and
the voyeur version of me
who will be writing down the inevitable mistake of our bodies

I'm not in
to that Adam says
while parker shrugs off his towel

There is not enough
shower for both of them
The bed is a different mistake
Knees bumping elbows
Apologetic headbutts
Parker sits on adam's chest and

(in the corner of the room
adam is taking notes How
they refuse to face each other How they know
they are assembling a model
with half the pieces missing and
no glue)

nothing looks like it should
from this angle Adam pushes

(in autobiography of red by anne carson
Greydon the dragon boy has a journal he
records his intimate thoughts in Adam
has a journal too but
he worried he was treating everyone like a story
where he was
shining protagonist Knowing himself fork
with missing tines
Sneakers scuffed by arrogant time He shouldn't
write this Parker didn't
consent to be
known as from adam's old neighborhood
A litany of misgivings
Having his knees
focused on instead of the ass so
amply positioned Parker asked for
none of this misalignment)

The are both finished and dressed
before the possibility of conversation

Adam doesn't mention the angry
text from a woman he barely knows How he kept thinking
you always pull people into your drama was coming from a woman
intending to pull him into her drama Her drama being
currently the desire to be right in a conversation
five years forgotten

Parker doesn't admit he ran into three
friends on his way over and couldn't come
up with a convincing reason for walking through
the tourist end of town
How he suspected they knew this would not be
his first time in a motel room
                         with the wrong man

Each of them just wanting this want to be overwith