supposed to: jim tolen

Better days are the ones misspent as this where instead of what I’m supposed to do I write these words or better and implore you in a hush to fuck me like I’ve just come home from a war to which tomorrow I return. Worse and more frequent are the days of endless solitaire and magazines instead of the work that has to be but not yet, just not yet, and I, like you, know it would be better to be done with it and have what time remains for what I love, for the words and respites from war, perfect al fresco cappuccinos between, brimming with froth. The sun and strolls unencumbered, the garden we tend still to promise ourselves, the cooking of what pleases, the laughter among friends at the little hells we raise, but—there is always this but like regret never worthy of a story, the but of the lists piled insidious before us, capable of worming like the spiritual slither of an opiate malaise—those powers with which we are left, good only for staring at computer screens, scrolling our way across their ether to the next window this weariness demands. This is why we drink and snort and smoke, gamble and cavort our ways into the stupors that possess and transform us into those we do not know, the interminable dread of dying into what we are supposed to do, of convincing ourselves that what we are ineffectually committed to supposing makes us worthy of our lives.