rob colgate

Schizo Disco

My dancefloor date says I should go over to his place, 
but I must go home to sleep with the boy inside of me.
The next night the boy inside of me beckons me 
back to bed just as my suitemates take the elevator

to the midnight cafe. I trudge to him in hungry 
wobbles, with lonely muscles never quite awake.
In the mornings the boy is very quiet
but very heavy. I drag him through my days

suspended from strings hooked into my eyelids.
The blinding weight. The waiting for him 
to go home. How he never goes home.
He never leaves me. Is this love? He wants it all.

Stay up. Sleep in. Club. Curl up alone together
on the floor of my dorm, gaze wilting under the bed. 
He wants to swallow everything. I try to tell him 
these drugs are too expensive. His face is too soft

to say no. His control over the strobe lights leaves me 
wide-eyed, staring up, mouth slightly agape
as if a camera is panning across my face, as if I am 
experiencing light for the first time.

There is the boy inside of me and the boy 
who contains him. These are the same boy. 
This is the same dance, the same learning 
to share our limbs.

Pancakes

I am not allowed to date because boys 
make my schizoaffective disorder worse.

Or I am not allowed to touch boys 

because all they ever teach me

is how to forget about language.

That’s unfair. They also show me how to leave, 

but I already knew that left is right.
That the sign that he will leave

is that he stays. But then, unthinkingly, 
in bed one night, the boy named

Joy and I felt each other.

I only wanted him to hold me

like the most beautiful part of my body 
was where it wandered off to at night.

But Joy didn’t follow me to that empty field. 
He was waiting back at home, making pancakes.

My mind wandered. I was crawling. I was really freaking out. 

The grass convinced me to sleep in the dew.

I do not remember how I got home. 
I do not remember eating breakfast,

only his hands in my mouth 
and passing out for three days.

I cannot forget waking up alone.

Joy, I did not want to believe 
our little fling was violent.

My therapist pulled up
the dictionary definition of gaslighting,

but I told her I didn’t know anything about cars.

I told myself that you loved me

so immensely and correctly 
that you could not bear to stay.

Bare yourself. I bet you are still in here

somewhere. Get up. We need to go 
brush our teeth. We need to stop

scrolling and go to bed. You go 
ahead, I will be right behind you.

Wait— no—is this the same bed 
we sat on that first night?

With all the fruit and syrup 
and truth? How did it get here?

This must be the same window then.

I would take you on either side of it. 

I did not remember the word for cure
so I smudged into the foggy glass:

I am feeling for the last time!

//

With an altered line from each Vuong & Kaminski