Entropy

In the interest of time and of keeping the content flowing, we present to you today a young man's poem, written nearly 40 years ago, in one sitting too early one morning while watching the sun taking its sweet time rising; to my memory a Sunday, after a hard night and before a full day's work.  It's a reminder of life before the pandemic if you can think back that far.  A time when you could make mistakes in public without necessarily killing anybody.

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A table here, a desktop there, a plant, a pair of shoes, a chair, a shroud of nicotine on the air.  And everything that shatters the teacups of existence.

A lamp gone stingy with its light, the method of dawn's break from night.  And each sharp body scattered has somehow homed in on my shin and every piercing wave pokes dumbly at my heavy ear.

And I am visited at this rude hour by mental and intestinal doubt like Russia was visited by the Tartars. Though I might have died for all the world's debt there were nothing sacred about my martyrdom.

And then I come to it, through a haze that, had it descended on Grenada instead might have repaired America to its shore: The Night Before.

The fact? I was like a vessel cracked, its liquid seeking every pore, where some will be reclaimed with pain but some must always stay.

The past was never a favorite haunt.  The future's perched on toothpicks.  But I would take them both in place of last night and today.