To think that I will ever be happy is 

to tell a child that the moon follows them

as they gullibly stare through the car window.

Neither of us are important enough, simply 

naïve enough, and naivety is what keeps

fools like me swollen with lunar beliefs.  

 

Unlike a child, I know wrong from right, I

know that the moon doesn’t follow you except on

certain cloudy nights, when it stirs like a bright

orb in a soup sky and I almost believe it all over. 

These nights I see the moon as the blazing living 

room light under which my mom and I compare

temperaments, our voices waxing to its shadow.

 

My mom is a child, I believe, because she crawls

through life without regard for others and drinks

white vinegar thinking it is water at half-century

age, lonely and always looking for more than the 

moon to gently hold her hand back home. But

I am worse, a heartless mother who lets their child 

stumble and fall eclipsed to the same trick over and again.

 

I always wake up with two things: an ephemeral

hope, a veil for the washed-up sins of the night 

before, and a gnawing ache in my stomach that only

a childless mother could discipline, and what is worse to be so

lonely that I detest even the childlike mother who gave me

life or to be so lonely that I may just become her friend.

The moon shines down and beacons for me to follow.

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