3 hours ago
A Very Good Morning
My spine curls up inside my body
like a fiddlehead. It is too early to be up and so I am
of course, already and as light milks through the blinds
again I curse myself for being
how I am. I should have closed my leaden eyes
before it was too late, and now in two short hours
I will have to rise, wash the stink off hair and skin,
button down, make ready. Sink metal into pedal.
Arrange my second face. The work will be there
waiting, open-mouthed, in its generic bulldog way and I
will place my round head squarely
in its jaws. People I don't know will smile and speak to me
as if we were great friends, they will ask me how I'm doing
and I'll answer with a question. An outpouring of
Guatemalan coffee. It's enough to make a man let go the rope,
bolt himself indoors and read the first six volumes
of his father's old Brittanica, the one with ancient names
etched on the spine like Tirane-Zwygny, purchased
at substantial cost to fill a brown boy’s red balloon with facts
and fantasies. This I will not do. Someone needs me
to get up and make the tiller sing. She nestles into hours
soundless as a stone inside a peach, arms of hair spread out
across the pillow like an octopus and she is fast asleep
and dreaming, dreaming of deep water, the kind so full of life
you couldn't drink it if you tried.
My spine curls up inside my body
like a fiddlehead. It is too early to be up and so I am
of course, already and as light milks through the blinds
again I curse myself for being
how I am. I should have closed my leaden eyes
before it was too late, and now in two short hours
I will have to rise, wash the stink off hair and skin,
button down, make ready. Sink metal into pedal.
Arrange my second face. The work will be there
waiting, open-mouthed, in its generic bulldog way and I
will place my round head squarely
in its jaws. People I don't know will smile and speak to me
as if we were great friends, they will ask me how I'm doing
and I'll answer with a question. An outpouring of
Guatemalan coffee. It's enough to make a man let go the rope,
bolt himself indoors and read the first six volumes
of his father's old Brittanica, the one with ancient names
etched on the spine like Tirane-Zwygny, purchased
at substantial cost to fill a brown boy’s red balloon with facts
and fantasies. This I will not do. Someone needs me
to get up and make the tiller sing. She nestles into hours
soundless as a stone inside a peach, arms of hair spread out
across the pillow like an octopus and she is fast asleep
and dreaming, dreaming of deep water, the kind so full of life
you couldn't drink it if you tried.