Another week for you to soldier through,
you woke up and armed yourself with a pen.
The desk called for you again this morning,
before work, and you went to it for orders.
The poems you write at it lately are beginning
to look less and less like what you write,
in fact, they appear to resemble poems
you wrote a lifetime ago, before you learned
to dig into one and shoot for commanding symbols
behind lines of anything with color and
a heartbeat on the other side.
After writing the poem, you marched to work
with your head held high, at the very least
at the intersections, and upon arriving, you said
hello to a coworker who tried asking you
how your weekend went out of guilt, and
you told her you didn’t do too much,
how you’re not poor but broke, but grateful
for the time to decompress. When she
suggested you take a summer job, you felt
your hands in your pockets turn into fists.
She held the door open for you, and a hot,
white light overcame your imagination, and,
for a moment, you wanted to be in this
kind of heaven, far, far away from here.
You told her thank you and have a great day,
and, with a big, unnatural smile
wide across your pasty face, like something
out of a horror movie, you thought,
you pulled your numbed countenance
back and let it loose to ricochet down these
hallways of war on the way to the men’s
bathroom that has always been there,
that has always waited for you to come back
in one piece.
poems