The Hour of Choosing

The Hour of Choosing

Facing this cicada night straight looking out into a lover’s speak

Clearly in the still black breeze rustling in on the edge of this porch

The sight is sterile in the movement, clean like a hand washed

And lost to every other soul, but mine

Grasping me here on a fly-fishing line snatched in a grab that

This is my last choice I ever need to make, the strum of this love

Biting in and taking the decision to live, this graduated life

Out of this somewhere around midnight

Makes all the other losers run who seem to fail at life

Prioritizing the bills sleeping in the banks or the ladder of faces

That just stare back blank with plastic sleeves and overt chests

Of treasures gilded but irrelevant in the only jewel worth finding

Inside her breast like the only closet left

In this world calling out and yelling about a life just starting

A life just breathing guarded by nothing, not anymore

Open and vulnerable and entirely consumable

Out here in this death-trap love, risking it all,

Just for that sight on a porch at one a.m. and dreaming

Where everything passes and stitches in the seaming of a memory

There is no avenue to forget, not on any map of streets

Or any path left to this suburban opera blaring

About these busted and cry-for-joy at night dreams

Bursting in the backgrounds of those who get and do not get

The point of these motions and oceans of trials

Daily proving-grounds of choices laid out like land mines

And bonus prizes depending on the steps and those days let

Go of for priority’s sake and held on to for the greatest of prizes take

Down inside an imperfect body and never relinquished, not for the greatest sum

Of gilded gold, never ever could be convinced to let go

Of that smile, that outreach on a porch board at one a.m.

To send that infinite wish for better-than wrapped up in blanket skin

Knowing she knows in the rows of her own eyesight reflecting

Held on and sung on to life’s singular blessing for me, for her

And damn the other waltzes and crosses to step through and carry

This is the moment, the feeling, the badge to hold up when all else has fled

What matters most in that hour of choosing, is this.