Friday Afternoon with Otis

Sitting at work together explaining to my fifty year old female coworker

Why the Blue’s Brothers are a travesty to soul

I explain about twenty-six year old Otis Redding plummeting in a plane

Playing Fa Fa Fa, I can’t turn you lose, Try a Little Tenderness

I feel like my heart is sitting on the desk

Just thumping there like an animated stapler

Sore eyes from going home to eat gumbo at lunch

Crying on the carpet kneeling to hope there is a God

Drying eyes with a black cloth in the mirror

Trying to look presentable and drain the head

Before returning to punching numbers in a computer and dying

Just god damn dying, not because the job’s a grind

But because coming home is the true hell

Trying to fill the silence with writing poems, letters, and stories

To ghost lives and ghost women attempting to shake

Shake in the morning, Early in the evening

Hoping for a head on collusion with the ground

To end it all, just end it all because growing old before your time

Is worse than dying young