Doesn’t take much. Doesn’t take
anything at all, in fact. I believe
I’m doing well, everything
is copacetic as the saying goes

when some little thing —
say, trying
to navigate the distance
between two familiar points

or maybe something as small
as recalling my credit card number
when distracted by the imagined flight
of a bird over my head;

maybe I’m intimidated into madness
by a snatch of a song I remember
from when I weighed less, much less;
can’t get past the chorus

so I sing it incessantly
inside my skull — then
I am transported into the soup
and stewing garbage of my soul

these days — hell, can you call
this a soul? Can you dignify it
with a word as potent as that?
Well, I call it that. I’m likely wrong

to call it that. I sit down
and try to calm myself, stop calling it
anything except — memory, I guess?
What it is, is freedom from the march

of time. I sit for a while.
“When what you need is what you want
then scream out for underground radio…”
Those aren’t the words but they will do;

a thin organ riff burns them
into me. I shrug off the credit card.
Follow that bird across the sky though
I can’t identify it. I sit with it till I am calm.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T