i see a long journey
a pale ribbon of road, as Nevil Shute wrote
i'm stumbling along its shoulder

the sidewalks

with their stamped numbered buttons

confound me
my age confounds me
i am not what I expected
Arrow of Time defeats our predictions.
are you what you expected
you'd better not be.
i said you'd better not be.
i wish you’d tried harder
and I wish I’d tried harder
how can I tell you to try harder now
i can't because I'm a phony
when my jaw moves you hear a dog barking

this morning an unshaven guy and a wall-eyed woman
spoke loudly at the bus stop
coherently but loudly
the guy wore a camouflage baseball cap
in a jungle he would be loudly visible
but for the area above the squamous suture
the wall-eyed woman appeared to have
pinned her hair up in the dark,
or angrily or vengefully
or while running for the bus
these careless choices haunt us
wrong turns don’t always shatter bone
often the denouement is a sly flattening
a doctorate in the next room
who laughs till he cries, for instance
all the day long.

our bland nuclear furnace
describes a Euclidean arc above us
a prancing ass we have to crane our necks to see
and then we're blinded by it
celebrated fire dips out of sight
rises elsewhere
serenaded by poorly programmed songbirds
with blank expressions
ma'am make of the dawn what you will
write your crappy sonnet
your daybreak is a coordinate on a circle.
there I said it.