We’re all about a lifetime of bad habits.
Confessing and amending. Reluctance
and imagined freedom. Deliberation.
The choices we think we have.
Sartorial choices. Our desires.
Our needs and wants. The echoes
of our self-talk, the ways we amuse
and distract ourselves, taking
responsibility and paying for our sins.
We always have to pay.
There is no putting off debts earned
in this hard-knocks spiraling life.
The benchmarks met, the expectations.
The blind spots hidden by the judgments of others.
The subtle trepidation gone unspoken for so long,
then regrets suddenly surface.
Question your detractors,
but question your supporters too.
Question everything:
for happiness is relative, elusive, ethereal.
And sometimes black-and-white
in an intrepid world of passion and color.
The crowd is restless, loud, opinionated,
and the competition fierce and vital.
The noise is continual, impossible to ignore.
It’s a roar, a collective verdict’s renown,
a yelled thumbs up, a screamed thumbs down.
We hear it forever, without and within:
there’s no escaping this infernal din.
is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He is the author of five collections: Small Consolations (Aldrich Press), Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), Rocky Landscape with Vagrants (Cyberwit), A Careful Contrition (Shanti Arts Publishing), and most recently, Inside Outrage (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions). His chapbooks include Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press), and The Covalence of Equanimity (SurVision Books), a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize.
