I had this small yellow notebook, one of the ones where the cover flips back on a thin metal spiral, one of a few an ex-lover gave me—she, one of a few who loved my words. It fit perfectly in my back pocket and I’d carry it with me to jot down thoughts, ideas, jokes—poetry when I had the time.

            Ah—there’s nothing worse than a lost thought! Yes, there is—a lost poem! No—a lost notebook full of thoughts and poems! Eh—really a lost love, but who’s keeping track?

            One drunken night of boneheaded shenanigans in New Orleans—barhopping; mixing rum, tequila, whiskey, beer, mushrooms; conversing with women; breathing in the blasting brass of the horns of young street performers; talking shit to ‘street poets’; hustling a curb; riding some kid’s skateboard in the middle of a busy intersection; breaking into an above-ground cemetery and an in-ground pool; some fine lad in a suit chaffeuring us around, chaperoning the whole thing—I blacked out and woke up on a couch to find my back pocket ripped out and the little yellow notebook with the thin spiral-bound cover lost somewhere along the way.

            I once found my trusty ol’ flip phone, bewilderingly, after I blacked out in the streets of New York City—but there, then, I knew I stood no chance.

            I wracked my brain as to what was in the notebook, but that’s exactly why I had it in the first place: so I wouldn’t have to remember the stuff I put in it! It held seven or eight poems, as well as a bunch of fragments and tips. Out of the poems, maybe two were wastedly-crafted and worthless, four or five I managed to recreate! And one which I was semi-fond of was unrepeatable—gone, lost forever.

            Now, guys and gals, this bothered me much, much more than it should have. Much more than most things. More than I care to admit. But what can I say? This is my life and it means a lot to me.

            The poem was lengthy, the longest of the bunch (which is why it was the hardest to recapture), but it was more or less an anecdote of closing down the bar I worked at with a kid named Justin from Panama, a girl named Maranda from Texas, and a guy named Adam from good ol’ Buffalo.

            It described how I was driving my absolute pile of shit vehicle (I’m sorry, condolences due, RIP Black Betty) through a thunderstorm, drunk, and how the windshield wipers went on strike (the one million ’n first thing to quit on ’er), splayed out like dead spider legs or the legs of some inviting call girl, and how I was forced to pull over to call the girl waiting in my bed and figure the whole thing out.

            It was at that time the wipers started working again and the rain subsided, so I pulled out the later-lost notebook to throw down the words I’d later lose in Louisiana. The whole thing was a metaphor for how ridiculously laughable my life had become at the time: shitty car, shitty girl, shitty job, drunk driving, blindly, through a heavy downpour—but at the end things were looking up, because at least I had a shitty car, a shitty girl, a shitty job, the storm had died down, and the wipers had come back to life.

            So, this, this, guys and gals, this is the closest I’ll ever get to reciting that poem. This, this one is for me. This one is for you, too. But this one is mostly for me: to remind myself to let it go, to forget… and to get pants with stronger pockets.