For the fourth time in as many days,
I wake up with no more sleep in sight for the night.
I leave the bed and sit shirtless on the porch,
omnipresent cigarettes at hand
to give me those moments of visible proof
that I am still breathing.

At this hour of the dark morning
there are, finally, no other lights on in the neighborhood,
and the last noisy kids have long since passed out.
The war in the downstairs apartment has calmed down,
no one is fist fighting in the driveway, the string of skinny girls
who come in and out at all hours has ended, and no clouds of reefer
rise up the stairwell to remind me that
if I had it to do all over again
I would likely do it the same way:
the same triumphs, all the mistakes,
the fumbling plays for love,
holding the gun to my head
while wondering what it would feel like
to just pull and go, the decision
to leave that decision alone, the sunsets and dumbass jokes
and the poems in piles everywhere I look.

I’m the same person I was when I was young and stupid.
I still like my music loud and simple. I still think kissing
is the best way to pray. I still hold my head down
when I walk by myself thinking of what to say.
I still like a beer, an occasional shot, a random toke or two,
arresting eyes and the curve of a perfect hip.

A car pulls into the street with hip-hop bending
its windows, and I recognize the words “Rompe!
Rompe!” I think it’s Spanish for “broken,”
and if it’s not, it will be for me, at least for tonight.

At my age, I finally know I’m irreparably broken,
broken
the way an egg is broken after the chick’s moved on.
I’m broken
the way the clock is broken, holding steady at one moment
which will come around again. I’m broken
the way a ripple breaks over a rock
it will eventually wear down.

In this dark hour of the morning, after the last kids
have fallen asleep, after the last cars have been parked,
all I have to separate me from everyone else on this street
are my raw lungs, my drifts of writing, my scars and tattoos,
my illnesses both transitory and permanent, and the fact
that tonight, I am awake.

To be awake at 3:30 is to be
smoking and cold and buried in thoughts
of all my cracks and chips, until I see my mending
in the light at the end of the cigarette:

to be alive is to be broken.
To get older is to understand
that every break leaves an opening.
To be whole is to walk through
the opening, and only then
to know which cracks to seal,
and which to let alone.