Poetry

Steve, though he’d cut you
if you crossed him, drop you like a sack
of potatoes if you came at him drunk
like Randy Parr in the backyard,

Pink Floyd’s Animals
drones through a thin
dreamless sleep I keep

each day you wake wishing that what is, is not, and that’s no way to live.

the owl refuses to dispense any wisdom
but has a few questions of its own:

the ogre of gratitude dangling like a chandelier from the rearview mirror asks if
you know how lucky you are, if you’ve meditated on that yet, if your heart

My therapist says a boy with a secret
is easy to control. I wonder how
Steve learned mine, if I told him

in exchange for a public chance at a longer private life, you give them
not your body, but your body’s one error in calculation. the swerve,

This is the year strangers
will say terrible things

about you