Blue Peach

‍

It’s all I can do to smile. Three jobs and no money. Someone come,
deliver me from endless subways and strangers standing too close.
I’m standing now behind taps in a theater bar where someone
who got a free ticket is complaining about a three-dollar tea
and another lover of the arts is asking for a glass of water
to wash down a pill. I’m exhausted. People just keep coming,
offering nothing but crumpled dollar bills, nagging me
for a receipt for a three-dollar tea, and I can’t drink like I want to
because that’s wrong apparently, here or anywhere, and someone loves
me, I know that, and I have a studio apartment
a landlord gave me when I didn’t have a job and there’s nothing new
at the Guggenheim worth seeing and it’s $30 to get in
and they yell at you for having a backpack,
make you wear it on the front like a newborn,
and I’m still not sure I’m ready to be a father and all I want
to do is stand in front of Cezanne’s Still Life: Plate of Peaches
and stare at the blue one and watch the lady, like last time,
walk up in front of me, look at how intently I’m looking
at the painting and try to see what I see. But she can’t. She can’t
see the woman in the corner of that kitchen smiling at the blue peach. She put it there just for me,
just as Cezanne sat down to paint, just so I’d know she was looking
at that fixed point, masterfully set, and so important, like a moon to lovers separated by unfathomable silence,
and I’m no longer holding a peach but a cork
from a shitty bottle of wine and an old woman with blue hair is glaring at me.

‍