Unlucky

Concerning the business of finishing second—whether

Honey sticks to the palms of your little ones

Because it was sticky from the moment it dripped from the bottle

Or it became sticky once bonded with the soft flesh of hungry little hands.

Whether flowers in the garden die because they are not watered

Or if they die because they were fated to go unwatered.

A half-hitched hello is thrown to one

And a salutatory hurricane to another

In every half blind eye,

The kind that twitches in the act of chewing. 

The Olympics never famed a silver medalist. 

In the rainforest, when a green behemoth falls

To the leafy floor (a grand old sage who likely saw

The forests’ beginnings, when the old magi

Spun his honing wheel into green and brown

And sprinkled it out across the wet earth),

The only sapling to survive and take his place is the one

Who grew from the most favorable soil.

The lucky sapling who was intended from the start

To make the canopy seamless again.

God favors his fated favorites.

Keep the fiery fingers dormant in your chest,

Never allow them to escape,

Hold them at bay until the contents of your skull

Melt into a pool that seeps stagnant into the legs

And makes walking beneath the stuttering streetlamps

With your head up

An impracticality.

I’ll write another invisible epitaph

At three in the morning

Spin the words through my fingers in a manner that felt graceful at the start

But grayed with time, cracked along little weak points.

We’ll step toward the shadow of the stairs,

My left foot swinging outward slightly, habitually,

For an illusion of corrected balance,

And I’ll hold you back with everything in my arsenal

Other than my words and my arms,

But shoes pad their way up the stairs,

The door opens, the night rushes in,

And I’m alone again in the darkling house

With a familiar lovesick scent on my shoulder

And the air framed with yellow sparks.

Notes don’t come anymore,

At least, not like they used to.

I don’t trust them like I did

Not when the phone’s light illuminates a downturned face

And you get out of your seat and step outside

When every word that passes my lips,

That had festered in my stomach

And absorbed every inch of me

Is for you.

Four months in London

In a dusty room

With a stack of letters and a broken heater

And a capricious brain

But New Year’s came and went

Not with a bang but a whimper.