Spring Reverie

It’s his second cigarette of the day
and the man is thinking of how his body’s flaws
are starting to link up — the strep swollen throat
aggravating the apnea and disturbing sleep enough
to make him fearful of a depressive outbreak to follow —

watching the kids out of school strut the street
hand in hand saying fuck this and fuck that
every three steps and he’s thinking now of how green
the new leaves are and saying to himself that
fuck this ought to be his new motto:

his body is falling apart slowly, gracelessly, while his center
firms up sweetly into melon balls, cantaloupe, honeydew;
why tell the world there’s a pain in you when there’s so much more to see
of the good? These kids don’t know shit, he decides;
only an old man can say fuck this with the proper inflection.

So he does — whispering it into the twin ribbon that rises
from the end of the cigarette. He practices with a smile on his face.
He says it out loud a dozen times, and his eyes become wet from the pleasure,
he can taste how sweet with defiance he has become, and the kids don’t come
to mind at all as he scrubs out the butt and goes smiling back to work.