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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