25: man shoes

this poem was begun at 7:49
and this morning I’m a cow or a fish
for the first time, starting over, wearing man shoes

imaging this at 7:49
can be compared to flying
which would make me a bird

or something lighter, forced by the wind
above the cold smoke stacks
to make Os and triangles.

I don’t know about bravery
or courage.  My admittance
comes with a cost:

the cost being what I left
behind when I stumbled
into the dark alley opening,

heard something, stepped
back out and ran the long
way home, leaving a part

of myself behind
at that alley between the houses,
listening for whatever had been

crashing through the trash cans
to appear and attack:
I’d think of that at the front

door home, what I’d left behind
to stand and wait and what
would’ve happened

if I’d tightened my shoulders
and entered that darkness
(feared by street lamps even, apparently)
maybe for a meeting with cats?

I’ll never know now.
I could have been greater
that what I was then

but not greater than what I
am now as what I am now
is a poem at 7:49 writing

beyond the first line,
which is what we all
do by impulse and subtle choice adding

yet another layer to the surface of time
and hoping that the alley’s
dark loud thing

was something less than
the future and more merely
imagined cats and not a waiting knife.

Any knife in the hands
of someone crazy can cut
the world in half,

and even so long ago I
understood how, on a short walk
to play, a child can leap

from a wall onto an innocent board
and cry back home to suffer with a nail
through the heel,

how in an instance the world
can shift one inch to the left.
We live in a perpetuity of futures:

find them by following the blood trails:
trust me: tomorrow you’ll lose a leg,
put a paper cut to your mouth

and you’ll say yesterday I lost a leg, yesterday
a paper grew sharp, and you’ll be back
where you started, to start over again,

a little heavier, perhaps,
than you were yesterday,
even with pieces of you missing

this poem was begun at 7:49
and this morning I’m a cow or a fish
for the first time, starting over, wearing man shoes

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