On 51, I decommissioned my calendar, wristwatch, and wooden pencils
On a path that encircled a gut-shot Buick, and waded a rent wetland, and at last dove with some swallows under a small mobile home
My filthy jeans slid down my ridiculous hips, under a wallet’s weight of faded receipts and expired IDs, and robbed my freedom of its knees
Following as closely as the rattails swishing from the low floor joists allowed, and sliding over plastic sheets of invertebrate mold,
my thin pupils whistling Der greise Kopf, otherwise breathless in the dust and shit
….
At 27, adjacent to but above the new car alarms and tiny phones, and swishing in all that generous time instead of stepping on its neck
Sleazy amoral fucktard, sooty with bunker flannel and shallow nihilism,
and despite these carefully hoarded misfortunes meeting my future wife, on the clock,
at $11 an hour, our future hedged on bourbon and statistical inference, and love despite it
…
As for 5, it is now all bloody unrecoverable
a child may understand art like no other but he will never remember any of it
a poem just behind the teeth, just before sleep, and after only 6 hours it’s already a thousand years lost