My Current Accumulation

I do not have many days where I am excited about doing anything

I am sure other members about the populace have more or less

Of these rotations on the Earth’s axis than I have experienced,

But I am limited to my self-perceived allotment  

I can recall as a child as many raised-Christian children

The expectation of Christmas morning and the beguiling-cogitated offerings

So carefully selected in appearance and iteration that would hope

To prove He-Man and later a Metallica Box Set had relation to Jesus 

I recall being worked up for these days on a descending growth curve

There was my fifth birthday where I was blessed with a bounce house

Which in the early part of the 1980’s was a king’s bounty of jubilation  

I remember spending a week or so at one of my friend’s houses who had

Moved to Ocean Springs Mississippi around the age of eleven, only to

Have two of my younger brother’s best friend twins moved into his departed home 

The randomness of friendships is not lost on me or the thrills such bonds do make

I remember playing touch football for a few weeks my eighth grade year,

Where I was picked first as I was a dexterous touchdown machine on asphalt 

I remember seeing the movie Kuffs, I believe, staring Christian Slater at a dollar theater
And a girl's green sweater 

I remember a student council summer workshop and a cafeteria table full of high school girls wanting to hear what I had to say; I remember buying a corsage for one them later on  

I remember a single note reciprocated by a girl with curly long blonde hair that instructed me to talk to people.  

I remember finally feeling like I had a best friend in the world my senior year in high school,

After helping him with his algebra on the steps of the library next to our campus

I knew he understood the isolation and darkness that beat inside me,

Segregated iterations for certain, but of the same genius and profoundly kin 

I remember the yellow post-it note with my future wife’s name pre-printed

That she wrote her phone number down in those pre-cell phone days of my senior year in college 

I remember a flight across the Atlantic, Holland, a bus trip to Paris and proposing in front of a most distinguished chapel. 

I remember my first day at Arthur Andersen 

I remember finally finishing the renovations to our first home and painting the nursery. 

I remember the birth of my only living child and holding the right leg of her mother,

And the grip of my infant’s hand around my index finger. 

There was the day we sold our first house to the offensive coordinator of Tulane football and cackled like giddy conjugal-visit inmates that someone purchased our rotten sack of beans 

There was the day in spring where I finally got to move out of my former in-laws dwelling after two revolutions around the sun to sleep on my own pillow in my own bed in the porch house.  

All the days in between and thereafter I do not recall with such kindness, but a few more,

This may sound like a splendid list, but to me

it is noted by its absences far more than its inclusions. 

There was a drive home from an Amite, Louisiana courthouse followed by watching my daughter play find the raisin under bottle caps with her grandfather.  

There was a dinner where I ordered blueberry quail and my counterpart did not care for her eggplant, but did for my hand and a kiss under a town-sized weathervane while sitting on a green park table. 

There was going to jazz fest on multiple iterations with my brother and father and seeing Pearl Jam, the Avett Brothers, and Bruce Springsteen among others 

There was the weekend where I thought I had my house sold to a woman with a dog grooming van and a job with a crew of trust attorneys, neither of which consummated the agreements.  

Then there was the poetic possibility like oceanic depths pressed to walk Magazine Street and the resonating silence.  

By my count that is if you exclude the Christmas and birthday exceptions, that is roughly twenty days out of a bit more than thirty-four years.  I am happy to have that, with the exception that approximately half of these days did not end as they began,  

So in if you counterbalance the pain of the ending with the beauty of the beginning, the pragmatist in me would prefer the bland oblivion of a nothing day.  For I do not rank these excited days as happy at all, in fact these particular ones are fonts of pathos, recreated into muses of poetry for what end I am uncertain, but I do feel a sense of accomplishment that I have processed the emotional fallout and am still here to tell the tale.