Off balance

'and i need you more than want you
and i want you for all time' -- Johnny Cash

I am in a house I’ve never been to, eating pasta, cooked for me by a woman I’ve never met. An eight year old boy sings Tom Waits- ‘I like my town with a little drop of poison’. Blink and I miss it. I go to work. I am funny tonight, really funny, the funniest I’ve been for a long while. After it is over I, the strayer, hang out with the long players, but my thoughts return to the previous sunset and her smile as we talked and filled the ashtray. I listen to the voices and they tell me how great and wonderful I am, feeding my ego with reckless abandon, chucking him juicy raw steaks with no thought for his bloating waistline. I sink back and watch, I know nobody, and everybody knows me. I will take this time home with me, this happiness tainted by its solitude. Another snapshot to lie dormant, gathering neuronic dust in my library for one. Memories breathe through shared experiences, alone they are like fish in the ocean, might as well be dead. There is scar tissue on my soul, layers of dead skin, yellowed and calloused. I have forgotten where my core is, I swear a lot, I am falling off my log frog, being with these people reminds me of where I left myself. But introspection is irrevelant for now, for now I am the amusement, I am here to make you laugh, listen to my stories of loss and desolation and scorn me. I blend in and out, I am the socialiser of the forsaken, tell me your secrets, flirt and hurt with me, you will never see me again. We are complicit and I suck you into my emptiness like a black hole [that does card tricks].