POEM A DAY 2020

What are these spaces that have crept

No Loitering

LEISURE WORLD,
my grandfather's store
still unerased along
the main drag, never re-
claimed after he went to
jail for tax evasion and
found the lord.

Unlike Fred's where my
mother hid from her classmates
while shopping. She found my
father in LEISURE WORLD,
knew his family name, walked through
aisles and racks with aspiration.
"There is still time for me," to
learn how to ski, to buy these
shorts, to wear those Nike's, to
do whatever people do with the
things that bring them to this
store.

"I am at this store!" my mother
screams, and my father's father
takes notice. "Not Fred's where my
mother shops, not the liquor store
where my sister meets the love her
life on Tuesdays and Wednesdays."
I can walk here. I can get a ride.


My father's father looks at my mother
his customer and asks, "But for how
long can you come to this store?"
My mother searches her pockets,
and buys baseball cards and football
cards. She asks for money from her mother.
She buys a pack every two days, and puts them
away, never opening.

Polecat

You have a childlike innocence, he told me
and I wanted it to be true despite the car-
wreck smile on my face I rummaged for
dialectical behavior therapy worksheets:

Hold on to the car that is running over you,
deconstruct the tread marks on your face,
cling to the grill and sizzle, scrape your self
purposefully across the windshield, and breathe.

Follow your breath into the air-conditioning
he's yet to turn off, your pungentdeathodor will fill his nostrils
and he will know what he has done. You don't have
to say anything. Let him crack his window and begone.

Thank you, I replied.

(><)

I kept thinking there was something happening in places and that's why I went to them.

You took seriously
my desire for being
serious and asked for
my hand, and pressed a
coiled spring into my palm.

“Hold this,” you said,
“and never pontificate yet
don’t you dare betray what
I have given you.”

I kept my hand
closed for a few years,
and buried it deep
within my pockets,
discovering for the first
time that pockets were
first sewn as an act of love,
or the necessity of being
unable to speak
of the coiled spring
in your hand.

What have I done with what was given to me,
I thought I let go of it!
With confidence,
I thought I spread out on the clay fjord
and announced myself as bread for birds,
my red, blue, orange skin refuge
for copperheads and cottonmouths.
Maybe I thought I would have eroded
by now, maybe this is where I erode to,
maybe it is time again.
I did not imagine I would wash up here,
nor did I really plan for procedurally (re)generated
always-obligations, always-responsibilities, always-exposure.
I let go of what was given to me because I thought
I had enough and I was wrong and I will always be wrong
until every grain of sand finds a resting place.

Such an urgency to leave, 

I labeled a box Non-Event, Anti-Spectacle, Non-Coping Mechanisms, Non-Ulterior Motives, Anti-Selfish Non-Self Ideologies and put what remained of my faith inside it.