Sadness in Sam Glaspy's "1/31/2020- Opera" arrives without explanation. Something at the opera hits the speaker with a grief he hasn't felt "in a long time," and the poem never says what caused it. It tells us what happened afterward: he ate and ate, rode home on a bus, and slowly found a way to talk himself back toward the world. The date in the title makes the piece read like a diary entry, though that is an inference from the title, not something the poem confirms. Its central idea is that loneliness can be turned into a kind of tenderness toward everything that is not a person. In the poem's own words, "when there's no one to love, / You fall in love with the world."
The form suits the confession. There is no rhyme and no steady meter, and many lines sound like plain speech. The short fragments "I ate / And ate" stutter on the page the way compulsive eating feels. The bus passage stretches into long, reporting sentences, as if the speaker were counting small facts to stay steady. The lighting is carefully chosen. Brake lights briefly turn strangers' faces "a glowing red," and then the "burned out" streetlights leave only darkness. Waving at those faces is a small, hopeful act, and the speaker answers his own lack of response with two possibilities: "Maybe they didn't see me in the dark. / Or maybe they didn't care." He doesn't choose between them, and that leaves the sting in place.
The first real turn comes when the headlights behind the bus fade, and the speaker says it was "like losing friends in a way." He then qualifies the comparison: these would be friends "if the friends didn't know who you were and you just felt good about their existence." That is a lonely definition of friendship, built from one-sided goodwill, but it sets up everything that follows. The imagined companion in the next stanza is sketched in the same loose way. "Who was it? / I don't know" is a startling admission. The apartment in Tennessee and the Sunday coffee dates are plainly invented, yet what the speaker wants from her is specific. He doesn't want his sadness cured. He wants someone to share it with, since they "cry with joy that we each held on long enough to find someone to be sad with." The line about dancing to "the song that kept us alive or the song that tore us apart" admits that the same music can do both.
Then the grammar shifts. "I" gives way to "you," and the poem becomes a string of thank-yous: to the moon, the power lines, the "dark, scary woods," the cemeteries. The repetition sounds like a prayer or a roll call, and each address grants the object a little personhood. The moon becomes a "closest friend" who, like the speaker, rises and falls. The woods might hold someone, "if they're actually there like my heart says," and he greets them as friends anyway. Even the power lines, the plainest item on the list, quietly connect to the poem itself, since they carry what lets you "light the lamp you write by."
The cemetery passage is the most surprising. The speaker admits that visiting graves benefits the visitor, who trades "flowers and kind words" for "a headstone rubbing and pretty pictures." Then he says, "It's mutual." The poem lets the exchange be imperfect and still counts it as friendship. His wish that someone will one day feel that way about his own grave shows how much he wants to be remembered.
The last sentence returns to the earlier image of "gluing back together the pieces that need fixing." Now the speaker "falls apart," but "with uniformity," so that he can be "reassembled the right way one day." The word "uniformity" is odd, but it seems to suggest that the breakdown has a pattern and is not random. The poem is significant for its honesty. It doesn't pretend the sadness ends, and it finds comfort in the moon and the dark roadside without making them more than they are. For readers who have felt unnoticed, that stubborn gratitude may be more convincing than a happy ending.