Spring & Near Miss - Poems

Spring

I saw someone in a rocking chair outside that house on Pearl today,

the one that no one lived in until a month ago.

I’ve been measuring new friendships in years

and when they gather in my house

and ask me why my shoes are coated in road salt and Sprite 

I can only tell them:

It’s because spring has sprung

(better late than never)

and I got too excited imagining all the flowers in bloom,

so excited, in fact,

I just had to shake up my soda 

before I opened it wide.

I say:

“The world’s been gray for so long, 

I almost forgot how to see green,” knowing

the joke they’ll make about the cones in my eyes,

and I feign annoyance

and we all laugh at my flawed color-vision.

I want to sing with them in round,

I want to write the song for us to sing.

I want to write a great American novel,

a Haggadah, a comic book, 

I want to write poems addressed to each of them, second-person for my second, third, and fourth people.

I want to read poems they’ve addressed to me.

I want to have a skatepark named for me after I die,

I want it to be used for a time and then abandoned,

graffitied,

I want it to turn overgrown and fall into disrepair,

to be reclaimed by the grasses and the trees,

the birds and the bees,

and to bear no one’s name ever again

(better late than never).

Near Miss

I’m under a friend’s comforter,

their laptop in my hands.

They sit next to me and we work at the crossword.

It’s The Washington Post

because it’s free, because it’s our habit now,

because we read the clues from the top, not the side,

run through once across and once down without deviation,

and the laptop’s always in my hands.

Tonight, I can’t keep my eyes open.

I say goodnight and leave out into the cold

where my headphones are dead, 

and I sing the Pixies to myself.

I look down.

The sidewalk’s covered in bird shit, I realize,

before a fresh splatter lands an inch from my foot.

I’m spared tonight

but when they crows fly overhead tomorrow,

they tell me,

I’ll have used up all my luck.