this title has begrudgingly waited for some loving kindness, fulfillment-needy, since October of Two Thousand and Seventeen

which is not quite as long as the decades I have been waiting to
accumulate the words to provide us both, an inspired solution

my days are numbered
in decades, decals, varying lengths of hair,
belts with notches that ain’t reachable,
suits various, both too big and too small to fit,
the who who used to own them,
begrudgingly, writes this

city born and bred, with the pale skin needed to prove my urbanity, each day came unto me begrudgingly,
even, especially, the good ones

when I was ten and rode my bike from freedom to mystery,
and back again in a city that was ok, if you stayed out of its way
and knew the city’s vocabulary and its erogenous zones

when nothing come easy, when even the easy, when it comes, comes begrudgingly

when you think of love, and the next immediate thought is:
how great the cost - recalling too well,
the pain of childbirth and child rearing
and the staining, paining fluid is in perm-attendence,
that doesn’t ever fully departs and
is not never entirely stain-stick-removable,
and the children come ‘n go according to their schedule,
someone else’s vast eternal plan

life in the same apartment  
where my parents died,
listening to the stories of joined lives,
listen to the sisters telling them
over and over to a stream of visitors
earned from and of a 98 year life,
given up willing but, begrudgingly as well.

the story-telling skill because of them,
my mist-matched parents who did ok
and their very best,
gifted us hyperbole innate genetic
and all of us now registered
tall tale tellers;

some write for a living,
some live to write,
some write to make themselves clearer,
after honestly confronting their subway reflection  

words acquired bot ‘n sold,
they too are stains unerasable,
very always handy,
the one thing we shared, word skill,
was never at loss, words never held a grudge
no matter how long they waited to serve

this fact, begrudgingly confess;
all my-word skill was freely inherited...
and I hope it satisfied the title
and you, those that waited patiently but,
begrudgingly