I walked into The Porcelain Cafe, a coffee shop. I was starving for human contact, yet as I walked in I felt so repelled by everyone that I was afraid I would continue to starve. I felt they would look at me and imagine things about me that were perhaps untrue, but as I thought this I realized I was looking at them and assuming things about them that were probably not true. I had done my best to not look like a freak. I shaved my beard, converting me from a creepy, sleep deprived weirdo into something resembling a normal human being. But the hair was long, and I felt that the lack of beard, ugly though it was, made me look effeminate.

Yet I felt effeminate, or rather that my masculinity was a facade. Could they see through it, that I was a coward and a fake until you reached some ugly truth hidden deep inside that I was waiting to express? I was conflicted: I didn’t want them to see me, but I wanted to talk to someone. I had things I needed to say, even to a stranger. But these things I wanted to say, they would lead to conversations too frightening to have with strangers. I would be judged dangerous, undesirable to be around. I knew that all humans held their rotten secrets, but I wanted to express mine to someone, to quickly go through the niceties of small talk and get to the storm raging within and just say something that I needed to say, to let it come out and to have someone listen.

But I knew they would judge me. I would explain that I was not employed in any traditional capacity, that I spent my time living off of others and creating things that I desired to create. It would seem selfish; I knew it was selfish, and I knew that if I didn’t hide the whole truth that others could see that. I was ashamed to be found out: I was a poet.

Who cares what poets do? Most of us live lowly lives, we find beauty in things we can. Does it sound pretentious, to care about a thing like beauty in this world currently occupied by some nameless all-consuming obscenity? I would explain that beauty must be found in the corruption of the world, that the withering death of our society is itself beautiful, that the fear and anxiety is beautiful. I would explain that while I took it seriously, there is a laughter at tragedy that fills the heart of the poet, and it is a laughter gained at having lost so many opportunities in the name of authenticity, the laughter of an irony that the desire for immortality has so completely consumed a life that it is backed into a corner, firing out words from the hellfire within, so completely lost and yet so completely alive in its fear, the realness of the emotion felt as it courses through the veins and emptying onto pages of words expressing observations and desires, falling into who-knows-where.

But a coffee shop, I decided, would be the best place to be. It lacks the bland self-destructive pseudo-masculinity of a sports bar, the sparseness of a park, the raucous loudness of a concert. But in this place, conversations slowly arise. It would be up to me to say something to someone, to care about who they are, what they do, when I have only had myself and my immediate family to care about for so long. I am alone, determined to find company, but I have forgotten how to interact with others, being so accustomed to remaining aloof.

I sometimes went about town, at the various corporate-owned places that existed, and surely people wished to avoid me because of my haggard appearance, my calculated words, and my furtive eye contact. It was ridiculous, totally ludicrous how I presented myself. I am accursed, an accursed poet, and I should play the part. But today I did not want to play the part, I wanted to connect to someone, to escape the walls of isolation and the retreat into the self that had occurred.

I looked at the place. People no longer presented themselves in a friendly way; everyone was on their phone, pretending to tend to their drink so they could avoid others and their disagreements over politics and lifestyle. I realized as I scanned the place that we had all undergone a retreat into the self, that for many of us, we were all we had, and we had come to guard it carefully. I was not sure if I was imagining this or projecting my own feelings onto others, but before I even could order coffee I had already determined that this was not the place for me, that there was no place for me, that I belonged nowhere except among my own thoughts and occasional stabs of feeling in my heart, and I left.