the room smells like dust and there’s the kind of silence you only hear when the clock knows you’re losing, or its winning.

I used to think there would be time for more gin, for more mornings, for more women, for more Kentucky Derbies, for another chance at everything

especially to say the things that burned my tongue and lived in my heart.

but I kept quiet

too quiet.

I kept the poems and the stories

locked upstairs in a crooked attic box

where the spiders are the only critics now.

they read everything.

and I imagine some god somewhere leaning against the dark, arms folded in disgust watching me cough out another thin breath before my last.

I want to tell Him

hey, look,

I was scared, man

they made me scared

not of dying but of being seen.

the spotlight felt like a firing squad.

so I wrote and I hid it like a thief hides cash

under loose floorboards.

what a stupid crime I committed

because now my lungs rattle

like typewriter keys on their last ribbon

and now the words are finally ready

to walk out into the street without looking both ways

but, the body has seen its last page.

God,

if you’re around for this sort of thing,

I’m sorry.

you handed me a small bright knife

called talent and I wrapped it

in Racing Forms, and drowned it in gin,

and left it in the attic until it rusted.

listen

if somebody finds those dusty poems

after the spiders move out,

tell them I meant it.

I meant every single word.

I just didn’t have the guts to live as loudly as I wrote.

I got caught up in a white-collar underworld full of gin-and-tonics and empty souls

watching horses race around a track.