Present Past the Future
For the page.

Nothing comes
Of me,
Solely me,

If I'm
Not
Here.

What a brat I am.
What self-righteousness I have.
What an American.

At times
At my most important
High-dive
I pay attention yet all attention
To no detail

Every detail
So committed
To the page
As an incandescent soul
Such as I,
Understands and accepts
The futility, ney, the fat-headed audacity
To think
They and their hand,
They and their mind,
Could get
Every last one.

To be a poet
Is to be attempting
The unattainable
Forever grateful
To even be given a glimpse
To the labyrinth
Of catacombs

A being
Who knows not their own madness
Will always,
When catching
Sight
Of their own eye in the mirror,
Will quickly look away.

Multitudes, He muttered,
As a cymbal eclipse ricocheted
And dissolved
Sprinkling the off forest green pine needles
Seconds before dawn.

*

There is no action without
The narrative
The framework of our lives
If we like it or not starts
With the vaginal stork,
Carrying you from holy non-existence to,
I guess, sorta-kinda, holy existence.

I try
Not to think
Of my mother
Giving birth to me.

I don't like to imagine
Her
In too much pain.

Just a little sometimes,
Like when she fake cried
When she was cutting onions or
She stubbed her toe
And punched a hole
In our new mauve colored iMac.

Those scenes of temporary agony
I could get behind

See,
These nights
Are nothing but
The page.

I forgot
I forget
How to even
Talk to myself

Sometimes.

Is that age?
Is that growth?
Is that the next
30
Years?

Luckily,
I only have myself so even when
I don't have myself,
They'll be roaming around
Somewhere around
In there

Of course,
There will be the page.
The pen.
The lack of thought;
The surplus of it.

Sometimes I wonder,
Sometimes I think,
Sometimes I query my own queries:
What if there was
Only my time,
My way,
My stay or the highway?

What would
Become of me?
My misery?
Would my self-worth
Evaporate to merely drift
Skyward - Cloud-ward?

Or would I become
Something else
Entirely?

Would I become the I
Unshackled?

Then, I see my parents, my father
On a fishing boat, his giant tanned gut
(Like the middle knuckle
Of a worn out leather baseball mitt)
Jutted out catching the 2PM sun, just a
Finishing pole in his hand, the line loose, perhaps
A fresh glass bubbled Corona in his hand.

I see my mother:
She's smiling at me,
Her red cheeks propelled by
The Polynesian breeze,
Forever content, eternally grateful,
For simply presence,
For simply time,
For nothing more
But experiencing in this life
What she never thought she would.

I see my sister:
She is nose deep in books
(As I always was an am)
And I smack her on the back of the head
And she screams, HEY!
And I scream, HEY!
And she chases me down the beach
To the beach bar where we drink
Daquiris and talk about what kind of people
We would be
If mom and dad had never split up.

"Someone's else entirely," I say.

I'm drunk and I admit it whole-heartedly.

"Yeah," Sister nods.

She was always one for math.
I was always one for words.

We were always ones
To survive,
With a smile,
And a spent mile

Under our feet.

Always
Ready
Thereafter.