some moths

you were telling me in a series of text messages about how you watched So You Think You Can Dance for four hours and gave your cat cornrows and felt as if you were a usb cable with a venereal disease caught in a public restroom

and I was in guadalajara with a boy in a straw hat who I met in a city I moved to because I am cooler than nuclear weapons and your father's degree in something with several latin prefixes

I only learned latin suffixes in a school with an empty parking lot for a playground

I do not get reception in guadalajara, antarctica, or the top of any hill ever I emailed you

you sent a viral carrier pygmy jerboa with a message that was encrypted and I could only decode it with my fake glasses

the jerboa had a hangover so I made it some orange juice from mexican concentrate and gave it some money for a greyhound bus with a deep sense that it would never really find itself

my fake glasses had a clever status message indicating they were away from every kind of keyboard and taking yoga classes for the remainder of my high school education

I messaged them the encrypted note you had sent and they felt their cellphones vibrate but were entranced in downward facing dog

I sensed you understood in the library and watched you for the rest of my life

“enough” said the straw hatted boy from the top of a thatched roof you built on a christian mission trip when you were 14

“You are making the light go out of your eyes, pretending you are alone in the world. I know your secrets—you took a summer course in eyeball electronics. I graded your final when the professor was masturbating with the microsoft word paperclip. You aren’t as deep or fascinating as that thing we found on the beach or as cool as a foamy drainpipe. You think hanging a hammer on a nail in the wall is funny. I am humoring you so I can collect material for a series of derisive one-page poems, wrought with postmodern quotation marks and heavy use of hooded-sweatshirt-colloquialisms.”

he said this in a soft voice that conveyed his concern for my diet and exercise and shot record

I wrote fifteen poems on my laptop and told everyone from my hometown about my unfinished novel so their father’s degree would not look down upon every dropout.