Scott Silsbe: She Got My Mind Messed Up

It’s what I don’t want to talk about.

It’s what I don’t understand, or else

what hurts me, and so, what I avoid.

I would rather discuss how good that

handcabbage is from the new Chinese

restaurant. Or how strange it is to listen

to a baseball game on the radio that has

crowd noise piped into the public address

because no one is in the stadium, because 

there are no tickets being sold to the game.

I worry that my friends think of me like

a dog with a bad case of fear aggression.

But of course I won’t bring it up to them.

I think I might feel better if I got some

work done—some writing, some music.

Or maybe it would just make things worse.

There are fleeting moments when I forget.

And I’m alive with my realms of being.

Before reality returns. This new living.

Is something burning? Is something here

on fire? It smells like something here is

burning or on fire. It might be in my head.

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Scott Silsbe is the author of Unattended Fire and The River Underneath the City. He lives and writes in Pittsburgh.

Copyright 2021 Scott Silsbe