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Living Amends

 

I arc the distance, barefoot across the crunchy summer grass, inviting bee stings just to remember my early years.

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Some sort of broken, I find myself, once again smoking menthol's in the alley, making a cryptic inventory of that which

 

I'd stolen from myself.

 

At the halfway house, I doubled the Lamictal and Lithium, just to wrangle my troubled thoughts.

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I claw at ephemeral phenomena, scattered and insincere, like trash being pushed around by the wind.

 

I return again and again to the love letters that were cut apart and fashioned into ransom notes, thinking of

 

the stigmata of cigarette burns, elevating with caffeine,

 

certain that the saddest thing I’ve ever seen was a man who couldn’t see, faltering along the curb, probing the uneven sidewalk in a forever-night.

 

So how do I mourn the lost decades and their many incarnations, like broken teeth, the feeling of being lifted from the mattress by a UFO beam?

 

As I arrive to make amends, I find that my parents appear much older than I had remembered.

 

We're human, for now

 

each of us hoping for the same thing if only for different reasons.