A certain loverly lady and I have been together almost 8 years now but it hasn’t always been this way. This poem came about when I was thinking about the perils of being single, the bullsh*t involved on all levels and the lengths to which we will go to not be single.
~TR
SINGLED OUT
There’s a point in time when a single person would rather eat a bullet than sit through another fixed up, mixed up, tricked out dinner
of jiggly Jello salad, soggy salmon, pasty pasta and sparkling whine served by friends in the misbegotten,
misinterpreted,
miscalculated
attempts to make the single into half of a couple, though who knows a couple of whats.
Couple of happy people,
slappy people,
slap-happy,
haphazard people
who would rather be fit and tied to the wrong person than find themselves alone with the right person, the person they have the right to be — themselves?
Fed up with being fed up and starved down singly and together, I put an ad in the column for singles who want to be doubles but should really remain singles.
Next thing I know I’m on a blind date with a deaf girl sitting in a movie theatre, in the dark, where she can’t hear my words and can’t see my signs, so we hold hands in silence and we both wonder how we wandered this far from the Sylvan Plath.
Not knowing where we were going, we stopped, and went home, singly, together alone,
Wondering who would wander yonder and keep us from placing another
mis-placed,
mis-construed,
mistakenly revealing
profile on LavaLife or Facebook or Craigslist
or the wall by the seldom-cleaned, always sticky, far-too-public payphone near the front door of the local 24-hour diner and fine eatery.
~
An excerpt from the upcoming The Cynglish Beat by Tim Reynolds, from Cometcatcher Press.
All Words & Images Copyright Timothy G.M. Reynolds.
Beat down by lost keys,
by lost wallets,
by lost innocence,
by lost love,
by lost interest.
The Tao of Tim 
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