WATCHING PAINT DRY IS UNDERRATED

                    by Cortney Lamar Charleston 

The day after the shooting, the day of the shooting, the day before―     
yesterday, I imposed myself on meaning without any measurable
success in the same manner my paycheck means no measurable
success according to the grossly affluent, gold dripping from their
mouths. I’ve heard the world is a beautiful place if it can afford to
keep you alive. To say something of where I stand, the windows
of my apartment lay bare the bareness of my accommodations;
against the sharp white walls I'm perceptibly colorful, so I exist
 
as an outsider inside the box buttressing my body, pushing back all
the casual calamities that come with living where I live, where I live
how I must, how I must as I am. The speed at which I take up space
or make space mine is a matter of history and trait. More than once,
the woman who loves me has asked why I don't flare for decorating,
but I know not nor expect anything to be permanent enough to care
to nest in a style suggesting I plan on being here lengthily: as soon
as something happens, well, it's happened, it’s shifted everything.
 
I'm rather sorry and sad if I think about it. I'm very fickle about
how I eat my time down to the nanoseconds. I don't intensely like
many things, so I don't go out unless I can't help it, usually when
the quietude cuts just deep enough along the scar line it left behind
before. I absolutely know I'm not alone in feelings of loneliness,
or disenfranchisement, or unfulfillment, but I don't see anyone else
here in my faux-leather boots with duct-taped holes in the soles,
shoot, I barely see myself; it's the flooding from the floor of me
 
during a thunderstorm that tells me it's time for a change in my life,
even a small one, and on a somewhat related note, I learned the shade
of blood smeared on a wall is called burgundy, implies wealth and
worthwhile, evokes consumption of fine wine―though I've opted to
work from a different part of the spectrum. I look around and think,
wow, what a blessing it is to be here―where I'm mostly safe―and
not any place else. If I have nothing other than a playground for echo,
I'm still grateful for it, and also for the slim chance I'll one day believe
 
what I tell myself about my self-worth after dribbling it off the walls
every day ad nauseam till it turns my stomach true like paint fumes do.

photo by Jeremy Michael Clark

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the
2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent
Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from
Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
His poems have appeared in POETRY, New England Review, AGNI, TriQuarterly, ecotone and
elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus.