When I was eight
I knew I would never go
To war and so
I knowingly deformed
My knees in an effort to approximate
My father’s, knocked, a little
Awkward, I’ve never been
One to calmly stomach
The mundane violence of being
A man, nor my own
Coursing potential to harm, hands
Thick-knuckled and shaky
Even on my twenty-eighth birthday
As I toured to the Bronx
Zoo and lurked amid The Land
Of Darkness, where umbrella-winged fruit
Bats keep pink-eyed
Deer in fear, I refuse hate as a kind
Of occupation, also kindness
As an excuse for simplicity, now it is
Friday and "blood confuses
The heart," which dithers serenely
One moment only
To be throttled the next, when I was
In high school I used
To keep myself
Up at night envisioning strange
Geometric shapes, each expanding to the point
Where it seemed to miraculously fill
My head and transcend it, this uncanny
Mathematics of volume turning
Spiritual as whole
Hours passed untended, unintended
Fatigue suffusing my days as now
There dwells a plenteousness confiding
Itself by honk and whisper
A squalid transient barking
At pigeon chicks
Hidden behind the psychic’s eave
Today’s miscreants hardly want
A mound of clouds to lounge
On, they want Mom and Dad’s job
To mean something
More than a fruitless lull
In the maroon
Between existential jokes, my love
Needs sleep, my knees
Need skin and I am becoming too much
A part of this
World, the callous-thick
Feet of a bearded
Bum swelling and bruised like plums
As the heat index touches one
Hundred degrees, "one should not go to church
If one wants to breathe
Pure air" and I now
Know the sum of learning: love
Terrifies the lover and loved alike.
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