How I Get Ready
What song will they play if I don’t come home tonight?
I wished someone would write a song for me, then someone did
but it was a song berating me; it was called “Actually, Ashleigh”
and I think of the cruelty of songwriters as I get ready —
how their music makes their words sound better than they really are
how our feelings make music seem better than it really is
and how the difficulty of getting ready is a pure, bitter difficulty
like calculus. In the back row a once-promising student cries.
What will my face become? Strings of demi-semi quavers.
I partition the day into a wall of smaller
more manageable days, each of which goes black
as I billow past in my bike pants and cleats
and I see I am not getting ready at all; if anything
I am getting unready, I am trying to be made lovely
by the glow of an Adshel in the rain.
In youth we are told we will rise up whole
from our baths, from the comforting midwinter soup
of our sadness. We will not devour ourselves tonight.
The dark broth will always drain from us.
Our legs will drain from our bodies and into the ground
and our footsteps will pour into the future. But the future is hidden
under thick nests of fat beneath the streets.
It pours out to sea, gently warming the earth
and its creatures. I go down there as I get ready
and the air turns over, gently exposing
its soft underbelly. My going-out clothes are waiting for me
ironed smooth, laid out like a disappearance.
2020-07-04 11:42:46
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