In This World

with the words
O my brothers
O my brothers
Anthony Burgess
stings my ears with
a new kind of violence
just as the wind
stings my skin
and the sun
stings the cold away
and before i miss it
i stop, the rogue farm
on one side of my
place in this world,
the corporate conglomerate
on the other,
and snap the photos
to record the moment:
2,000 miles in
not twelve, but eleven months,
the same day i discover
i’ve walked fifty in seven days
(108,688 steps)
and though they are numbers
(just numbers?)
they represent everything
that is possible,
that i believe,
that i thinkicanithinkicanithinkican
do in this world.

Existentialist

Perhaps I am an existentialist
like Sartre
the one I never read about
but Mrs. Clark told me
and that was enough to know
to know
that I am who I am
and no one can make me different.

(but if she hadn’t told me
at sixteen, would I know
that’s who I am?)
I’ll never know.