Jocelyn's House

Jocelyn's house...

It's pretty, yeah?

At her party last year, there were trays of everything, wheels of cheese,

And her husband, the charming guy with the battered hands

Who could play guitar same as he could build an addition

And who sang "Wicked Game" so beautifully that we all just stood there and stared,

Dumbfounded,

All of us, even me, half in love with him.



I didn't know then,

That you had already slept with Mikey, the local stone butch.

I didn't know then, that she was "helping" you in ways I never imagined,

I just thought she was cold, and unengaging, when I tried to get to know her on your account.

Always the last to know,

That's me,

The stupid Bo Peep whose flock is butchered, consumed and made into seat covers before I even miss them.



That's Jocelyn's house,

With the bird feeders.

I bet she fills them with poison just to stand there alone and watch them drop,

And I don't blame her.

It was you who famously loved anything that flew, and what I want to know is,

Are you straight now?

Publicly, unimpeachably straight, not to mention relentlessly sober, and all the rest of that shit?

I wonder if, as he sang "Wicked Game", he had the first notion that he was to be your

Lab rat,

Your livin' proof,

Your ticket back to a place where snarky bitches don't laugh at you from behind their hands?



I don't see you around anymore, though,

So maybe it all just blew up in your face.

I see him, walking alone, and he won't talk to me, just keeps on going.

I loved you, and I think he did too...

Now we both know how stupid that was.

If I could ask you one thing,

In the pointless too-late of it all,

I would ask you this:



Looking out of Jocelyn's windows that night, did it never sink in for you that the scene is the same through any shape of glass,

Or that when darkness devours the world, it may as well be gone,

And all you will see,

No matter how hard you stare out,

Is yourself?

________

for Willow's magpie 29

________