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By Emmanuel Williams

Here I sit in the best grand marigold hotel… on Colfax… in Denver, CO. On my own again…

YES!!

Now I can eat my own food!

This poet has fled the (second) nest (a second time)!

First I left my mother’s house in the projects while she entertained lovers so she could rob them for crack money.

The first draft of this was on legal pad, so pardon it’s raw, scribbled tone.

Anyway, part of me wants to chase down my sons. But I’m being patient about that. Because I may be successful and that scares me. There’s a time and a place for that, and it’s closer to a stability that I cannot currently claim.

I will always love my sons. Like I’ve always loved my absent, and now late, father.

But I’m scratching paper at an Inn. Like Christ, if he knew how to write an essay, or how to fuck a whore, or how to marry a slut, or higher alcohol by volume than the wine of 20-40CE.

But I am nonplussed.

I have snacks, food stamps, a new semester of college on the horizon, and federal funding for my education including 5K just for work-study provided as I work over the next 3 months. The tuition refund itself is close to disbursal and is going to be just spectacular.

I have work. I have college. This will be my first semester in two years without an English class on my schedule, even though I’ll be graduating in another two years with a Bachelor’s degree in English. 

This semester I’m giving Journalism another crack, I’m taking History of Ireland and the Irish People, a prerequisite Music Theory class, and my personal favorite challenge: Physics of Nature.

I think I can handle it.

I still need a math class to qualify for an Associates degree (General Studies), and I don’t start owing on loans until 2027. And I do NOT want to end up in default again.

I’m good.

Are you?

I may be stuck in a motel scribbling instead of typing, but I’m drinking without rules about it, open to sex with no rules about it, able to feed myself, miss my family in peace, crave my exes with my own guilt not what my weirdest little sister thinks about my past, write for my blog at 1am, listening to “This is War” by Smile Empty Soul.

That last part is the only thing I could have still done at my last … room? Yeah it was a room in a suburban home with my more responsible little sister. But lately it had started to feel like “the hood” again, and I had never been comfortable in such climates.

I hope to God my Apple TV gets in here… one sec…

IT DID!

Now I can watch my Mad Men, all my horror films!

Me happy Apple customah! Than koo Than koo!

Tomorrow I have a psychiatric appointment, I have to get a loaner laptop from campus (success), and all the remaining paperwork for the Apartment of my Dreams: Capitol Hill, Denver, CO

Can I end on that?

I’m gonna.

One cigarette and we’ll upload. ‘We’ as in me and Marilyn Monroe.

May all angels rest in peace.