I’ve written thirty stories this year,
and I’ve gone an impressive amount of time
without asking a police offer
to fix my glasses before they fall off.

It’s been ages since I’ve watched anyone
on a bicycle just barely make it past
the unrealistic moon.

I haven’t been better than anything.
I haven’t manipulated the smoke of a single campfire story.
I haven’t had one topside view of the teeth looking for a good time.

The wilderness took a piece of my knee away,
but that’s the price you pay for being too busy
wishing you weren’t making her so miserable
to remember that the sidewalk is usually motionless shaky ground.

The heart persists. That bothers me.
Two legs travel upwards half-a-step at a time. Who cares.
Great minds share a bedroom. A bad call is sleeping on the floor.

Great minds make for terrible funny faces.
Great minds think alike about not thinking about me at all.

Don’t worry. I’m always toppling the plans I’ve made.
Usually, God help me, I’m four memories ahead
of the ones who are about to get away.

And the traveling times are eerily similar
to the fashion show that gripped the whole wide world
in the fall of 2007. What I need is to get stuck in traffic
on one of those bridges, at a point where you can only see
about half of the puzzle those skyscrapers are trying to show me.

Should I complain?
Should I drop the tired southern accent I manage to find,
when I’ve made the coffee a little too strong for 1 PM?
Talk instead about the security of having all four windows down?

Four thousand cars racing all around us,
trying to find the streetlights that will keep the devils down
to the subway where they belong.

When she was beautiful and serene in the future,
and I was so tightly packed into the backseat
with my comrades that I couldn’t get my phone
from my pocket to reach out, and find her attention.

And I knew I shouldn’t do that.
And I was aware that there were still many more months
of layered clumsiness in all parts of life to get through.

No one should be waiting to hold my hand.
I don’t want to ask anyone to dodge the traffic
I’m trying to conjure.

But I wanted to bother her anyway.

06/11/2013

Posted on 06/12/2013
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