I Think I Exist (Out of Time)

When it was time to
sign up for kindergarten,
they decided I wasn't ready
and so I waited a year.
I only remember cats,
nothing about what
that year was like,
and the cats were
there, in their test,
one year later.

At some point,
they decided I needed
glasses, and I only
remember bad vision
the first time those
glasses were broken.
They also decided
I needed speech
therapy. I got stickers.
But none of that is
important.

Or maybe it is. I
would recite every
memory I have of
how I've arrived here today,
but that's not the whole
point.

When I was young, before
I had reached third grade,
a girl kissed me on the back
of the neck. They used
to chase me. By fifth grade,
they made fun of my lips.
I had somehow gotten
stuck in my own time.
In middle school,
they told me to dress better.

When I moved to Burlington,
I ended up working at a movie theater,
where nearly everyone was
younger than me, including
the managers, most of them,
and the youngest and my favorite
was the last girl I wanted
to chase me. I'm told
she's not interested
right now,
and so I can only wait.

Waiting's the real thing.
The first girlfriend I had
pursued me, and I hadn't
really seen her coming,
and that's how it ended.
I will be moving,
and if I'm to be found,
she will need to pursue.
That's my whole life,
the chase.

I cannot be caught.

I'm out of step,
a tick of a tock out of time,
a tock of a tick,
I meet people I want as friends,
who have the same interests,
the same passions, but in the end,
I'm always alone. This poetry?
Tomorrow, I will write more,
tomorrow a thought fusion,
but today? Today is not
yesterday, and yesterday
is not today, but, as I began
then, I continue,
and alone.

The love that you make is
equal to the love that you take?
Why don't you make more
why don't you take more
why don't you make more love?

People are gravitated to me,
I'm common ground,
but the ground?
It is cursed. I cannot
share in what I give.
I make but cannot take.
Do you think you have heard
all this before?
Well, please, direct me to that
person down the hole to the other
side, because I need to meet them,
I need to see and know and feel
and know that they understand.
I write a blog? That's in the
public, but isolated?
That blog is me.

That blog is me.

Tick tock tick tock, that's a progression
that doesn't repeat, but inverts itself,
tick
tock/
tick

(tick tock/tock tick)

as I've already written. I notice
the squirrels, I told my brother,
not as something cute and novel,
in this world we only see humans,
but as another mind, minding
itself. It does not need me,
does it watch me?
I don't watch nature,
I don't watch through
goggles, to know,
but to see.

I see.

I try and see.

That's a curse out of time,
the knowledge of existence
because I have seen it,
not because I believe or
I want to believe,
but because it is there
and I have bothered to see it,
the magician's slight of hand,
his trick,
his prestige,
the moment you make
the ordinary
the extraordinary.


Did you see it?