My RSVP

I’m happiest alone in a room writing poems

Fishing in Spring, the Pont de Clichy (Asnières), Vincent Van Gogh (1887)

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My RSVP

by Bob Hicok

You know you’re an introvert if the word party 
makes you think of sitting in your car 
wondering if you should go in 
or lifting your hand to knock on a door 
and turning around. How often I’ve wished 
humans had anal scent glands 
and just sniffed each other’s butts 
and knew pretty much in that moment 
if they liked each other, then wagged 
or barked and moved on to chasing sticks. 
Well actually just the one time in this poem 
but I like the idea enough to apply for a patent. 
It doesn’t help to imagine people naked 
and tattooed with Marie Antoinette’s nipples
or to think that everyone is thinking 
everyone is staring at them 
or to postulate that shyness 
is narcissism minus the ambition 
to rule the world. I’m happiest alone in a room 
writing poems, though not usually poems 
about being alone in a room writing poems, 
and will grant you that staring into the mirror
of language every day is the shortest 
and most honest résumé I’ve ever written. 
Turns out I look exactly like the wind 
and have the same address, and feel most days 
like a tumbleweed staring at a map. 
I know. I mixed metaphors and can’t possibly
be the wind and what the wind pushes around.
I can only impossibly be those things
for another twenty or thirty years
according to actuarial tables, which look lonely 
without actuarial chairs.