It understands that it isn’t enough to be beautiful.
It knows that it’s not enough to be true.
It’s able to move when it’s threatened.
It knows how to run.

It has a regret or two every minute.
It allows them to speak then forgets them.
It has a motto it will not merchandize.
It models itself on its history.

It ought to have been born later.
It should have spent more time outdoors.
It should have been aware of its unlimited scope.
It needed more teeth in its mouth.

It chews what it can as much as it can before it swallows.
It makes do.
It learns incrementally.
It is at peace with what it has become.

Left over boy thinks his face ought to be
darker by now, hands should be
more gnarled, tongue
more supple. He hates
his easy aging, despises
the leisure in his eyes.
On a Thursday night he slips
his cigarettes into his jacket
and heads for a bar, a dive bar, first
cruising the main drag for a hooker
even though he would never, would never…
a left over boy would never, instead
the women would fall onto him, pay him,
give up their lives for him. Left over girls,
he thinks, know guys like him are good for
a cigarette and a soft shoulder. All that darkness
makes him a good listener, he thinks,
he thinks…At the bar
there are dangerous men who look
the way he thinks he should look. Forget
his own arms lengthened by years of carrying briefcases —
these guys have been stunted and strengthened
by what they do for a living.
He thinks he could have been one of them. He knows
he is one of them, he thinks,
he thinks…

he thinks about his high school, the awards
for math and science, how he mounted the stage
with a pistol under his jacket, not that he’d have used it
that day, but the thought of it made the hours
under the desk lamp palatable, the cheap old crime novels
under the bed that made the stolen gun sacred, the sacred
that made the grind worth grinding, the taunts of the jocks
that made the sacred necessary. Every time
he opened a book he thought of opening a vein
in someone who made him think too hard. He wanted
a life full of hard feeling, hard life borne well
by a brilliant mind gone fungal in the fertile dark…

he thinks he should have fired the gun at least once.

At the end of the night
he goes home alone,
sways while he pets the cat,
then stays up late
in clean underwear
over a few more cigarettes,
watching a police show.
He’d have gotten away with it
if it had been him, he thinks, he thinks…