Train Tracks / Poem-A-Day: Day 9
When I started doing this poem every day thing, I promised myself I would not dis my own writing. But if i had not made that promise, I would be dissing this. Ugh. By the way, it’s a heavily modified acrostic with a structural curiosity I came up with a few seconds into writing.
Train Tracks
Given a chance to live once, I have
quietly opted to waste it, as though I might
discover another lifetime
hidden in locked drawers with
mementos that never made it
to the bedroom shelves: bruised
ego yellowing at the corners,
swallowed confessions, heavy-eyed fears
I held in my hands for two decades.
I hold two decades in my hands
every evening, splayed flat on my stomach -
I have been here before; my pillow:
broken pedestal, and my own head
balanced crookedly atop, I fight
heaviness above my eyes, because
the end of the day is so much easier;
the beginning is just lost time.
Lost in thought too often, I have begun
to find comfort in rhythm, to find rhythm
in routine, to find routine in the scenes
outside my bedroom window; the horizon
is a predator, and I think I would
like to move on from here to
wherever the sun rises after I do.
Everywhere is sunrise; do I
need to be reminded that the world
sees chance where I see trusses?
See what I trust to chance:
everything – no illusion
of control, no reasonable path to blame,
no recourse for spoiled plans; and
nothing – no certainties but one:
I have one chance to live, that is the given.