Bored starts with the letter L for distracted
for finding favorite songs that jettison to a year
or a time when a walk meant a daydream
or a nap was the continued story of you there, me
saying,
“It’s raining. Let’s sit in your car. I have something
to tell you”
In the middle of bored are people at parties you meet
they know about Things: they talk about the New York
Times. I scrape dirt from under my pinky finger.
Middling is about waiting for the check to come,
looking up, coming out of a daze, perhaps chuckling
at some joke, then the words
“In Belgium the divide is
like the French Canadians.”
At the end of Bored the letter S. S means the past and it
holds for me something with brown eyes, something with green.
It is unfair how we can’t say the truth: your S is about grief.
It is about knowing me and wishing you could know others.
You won’t say it because I’d fall asleep. I’d yawn.
When you can’t spell, you can cook. This is simple. First,
take Betty Davis and add cold rain on the front porch,
a messy garage, some undone laundry, a hangover. Then,
you could write a song or finally listen to the words of a song
he wrote, you know, I mean really listen. Then there would
be something like a morning dove in a caravan of birds, he would
lead the way in that soft doppy way, both a deer and an infant. He
would stare dark vacuous eyes and whisper
(so much so you think it is a voice in your head),
“Find it. Your time is almost done.
You have it”