a man walks into a bar and says:
take my wife\u2013please.
so you do.
you take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her
and she leaves you and you\u2019re desolate.
you\u2019re on your back in your undershirt, a broken man
on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains
on the ceiling.
and you can hear the man in the apartment above you
taking off his shoes.
you hear the first boot hit the floor and you\u2019re looking up,
you\u2019re waiting
because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be
some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together
but here we are in the weeds again,
here we are
in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn\u2019t make sense.
and then the second boot falls.
and then a third, a fourth, a fifth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
a man walks into a bar and says:
take my wife\u2013please.
but you take him instead.
you take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich,
and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you
and he keeps kicking you.
you swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don\u2019t work.
boots continue to fall to the floor
in the apartment above you.
you go to work the next day pretending nothing happened.
your co-workers ask
if everything\u2019s okay and you tell them
you\u2019re just tired.
and you\u2019re trying to smile. and they\u2019re trying to smile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
a man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
make it a double.
a man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
walk a mile in my shoes.
a man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying:
i only wanted something simple, something generic\u2026
but the clerk tells you to buy something or get out.
a man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
but then he\u2019s still left
with the river. a man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he\u2019s still left with his hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
by Richard Siken<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" a man walks into a bar and says:take my wife\u2013please.so you do.you take her out into the rain and you fall in love with herand she leaves you and you\u2019re desolate.you\u2019re on your back in your undershirt, a broken manon an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stainson the ceiling.and you can hear the man […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":31,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-36","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/poojasanwal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/poojasanwal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/poojasanwal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poojasanwal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poojasanwal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/poojasanwal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38,"href":"https:\/\/poojasanwal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36\/revisions\/38"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poojasanwal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/poojasanwal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}