I have been to very good restaurants,
with mini octopus and expensive sea salt.
Salmon steaks seared before my very eyes, while onion volcanoes eject oil plumes.
I recommend these places for their atmosphere.
For their steak that my neighbor, one table over instantly grams. That, andthe way the light reflects off her stuffed red pepper.
Her date said,
“it's crafted like a Jackson Pollock”, I’m heaving…
“That’s explosive I’m gonna throw up…
I’m getting food poisoning from all his bullshit.”

You can romanticize the geometry at the art institute.
The antennas on the tops buildings, which I’m pretty sure are used for aliens.
If I had the power I’d ask them about french kissing, if they know what that is.
I’m remembering the 8th grade, I was infatuated with things I didn’t know.
I would’ve asked,
“What would happen if I sucked her collar bone behind the backstage curtain?”
It’s what I did,
it's where I found a blackberry stain on the skin just above the nipple. And at a certain point I know that I thought,
“who actually WANTS a hickey?”
Do people really want them, or want them for what they symbolize?
An awakening, in the gravel parking lot, under the power lines.
Because If I reviewed my first hickey, I’d give it one star like the remake of a cult classic.

Some mornings,  skillets and your father are worthwhile.
"Seeing anybody?" he asks while the handful of gravel is clicking in his voice.

As I’m nodding in her room,
She's telling me about everyone in every picture, clinging to the wall like a question she wouldn’t want to answer at the moment, for that tall drink of water has red hair and isn’t here and hasn’t made an effort to make himself known.
Country music told me about a person like this, the buttons she’s pushing and the tires she’ll slash so next time he’ll think before he cheats.
I haven’t heard much about the other way around, but when it’s wrong, it’s oh so right.
Country music told me about bad boys.
Country music told me about women, and so did my father whom acts like they're subtracted from Adam and Johnny Cash, who sang to my papa about the color black, about all those white lines you walk in the flashing of the red and blue, but not what romance is besides dinner.
He died an old hard raisin of expectation following after his wife, who was ahead of her own funeral,
His too, who fit his tux like her box three years prior.
She did everything.

Disney told me if I rub a lamp, I'll be Aladdin.
My mother wipes the floor like an orphan, she says movies are liars.

Cats are sexy.
Cats can be romanticized with horses and Jodie Foster,
Reagan is fine though and this isn’t the 80’s which fell in love with the 90’s like six was afraid of seven, but seven was so nervous because 6 was really good at the clarinet, so seven asked her out for Peanut butter and Jelly’s under a pavilion while it rained, which totally wasn’t planned, but she said yes and they talked about their passions, until they became bf/gfand they dated for awhile and 7 left town for college and they’re not friends on FB anymore.
But that’s fine, high school is over.
I have been thinking about the things people do for attention.
Like push-ups, or Snapchat, or sauntering. Like magic panther on a sleek marble counter naked in all your face paint, all that glitter, that invisible scent from just beneath your jaw line.
Son of a bitch, all the things we do for that look.
That “ I want you in all your objectivity, right now.” Look.
People lose their sanity when they don’t get it. Guys with goatees and chinstrap beards and have punched walls over it. People have left town without it.
And I’d like to give a kiss just under your 90's choker of Nickelodeon and Wonderballs in 98 degrees of bedroom heat, and after, you’ll see nothing but the ceiling. So you pick up your shoes and walk to the elevator.
It's all goosebumps and goofy when you thought you knew what someone sold you.
It's all so raven and rugrats when you did the same.
I’ve learned that people like me won’t take the time to look beyond the fine silk socks in a moment of eyes not ears, in moment of you and only you, but not how you and me and all of the people have nothing to do.
It’s never how can I can support you.

The difference between love in a bed is love on a couch.
The difference between your bottom bitch, and your love on top.
It's like 2008 and banks.
We’ve done it once.
Maybe twice.
Maybe you’re like me and have ignored it.
Maybe you know who you are and are reading things over over and tossing the book to the rug and thinking.
“This guy is full of shit, fuck poetry.”
Or I’m standing at the shell of someone I bought beer and chips for and he says,
“I’m a wordsmith, a manipulative robot.”
Maybe I’ve sold myself and reviewed it in my bio.
Maybe I’m looking like a cynic, or a lonely train sleeper.
Maybe I’m just trying to figure it out so I can get a good review.
Let whatever you want want you, and let you want it. When it doesn't it will, because it will when it happens.
It happens when it does, and not when you want it too.

About the author...

David Stobbe is a local Chicago actor with a deep love for language. Writing was never something he considered and through solo performance, and more classical works, he found himself writing poetry. He draws inspiration from writer's of the beatnik generation, as well as the lost generation. He hopes to people through the absurdity of what we hold onto, and the generation that is wedged between no technology and the huge shift into a world where lives were suddenly run by it.