The one-hundred-year hangover eclipses
angels in the medicine cabinets, curing.
My neck is straightening and I hear church bells.
Astrology and other bad decisions are melting.
My eyes are delivering the Morse code for food
by blinking. Did you expect everyone to survive the film?
The concrete is staring back at me, and the world is spinning.
I would enlist in the army if my stomach didn’t
give away my position. Walking it back for promises to
not start the day without orange juice and coffee. I will
be out of town next week, for a conference. Can you
hold down the fort, or would you rather have Mr. Pearson?
I pass time watching people toss the tissue paper of presents
on the street corner. It will pass, like wells of petroleum, until
more things die and are fossilized. It’s different. On Tuesday,
the schoolteachers read big books with colorful pages
of animals learning to work together. Soon they’re dreaming.
That’s the cue for the children to take a nap too.
The chores of living everyday and buying little things
that are chores for another person to make. It is tails
on the coin toss of my generation, but we didn’t make the call.
M. N. O’Brien received his B.A. from Roanoke College, where his work was published in On Concept’s Edge and received the Charles C. Wise Poetry Award. His work was most recently published in SOFTBLOW and Counterexample Poetics. He currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky, constantly risking absurdity in a Ferlinghetti sentiment, playing old folk vinyl records and studying astrophysics and poetry. He feels awkward writing in the third person.
