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 deep or fascinating as that thing we found on the beach or as cool 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.