You Will Walk the Earth For Some Amount of Days
And you will get an apartment that’s aggressively ok, beetles
streaming from the walls included. Several babies will be born
in the same building but never meet as adults. It will strike you
as one of a growing list of cosmic injustices. You will wonder where
your wallet is and should I see the doctor now? Now? What about now?
until it’s too late or just in time or it wasn’t anything to begin with
so why did you worry? You’ll get hairy in places and want to plant
a garden. The capitalist in you will see a railway running through
Main Street, men on board shoveling dollars off the sides into
the hands of a single man, running faster than everyone because
he can stop time, didn’t you hear about him? It’s why he floats
around in that big balloon made in the shape of his face. Look
there it goes. Look it’s another dog lifting its leg, another neighbor
waving on the sidewalk. Even if it’s only a little while, a little while’s a lot
compared to nothing. The way eight ants are an infinity larger
than zero rings of Saturn or no international space stations or even
the future which is still beaming in like a cup of soup in the food beamer
inner from Star Trek. And you will taste a bit of success and wonder how
to steal more. And you will lick the armpit of failure again and again
and learn to love its sweet sour. Its sour sweet. And you will call it
up on a Saturday and say what are you doing tonight, sweet failure,
and sweet failure, nonchalant, will say…And you will wince at the sight
of crushed raccoons, foxes, squirrels, dogs, and deer. And bones
will keep you in place. And you will ask something of someone
or they will ask something of you. Now you have an economy
of trust. Congratulations. Now you have a method for making
enemies. Pick out your favorite and try to ruin their life, for
right now, in some well-lit office perhaps, someone may be doing this
to you. Above all, be glad for the present moment you can try
to learn to live in. Good luck with that. And good luck learning trigonometry
to a passable level, writing a staggering work of breathtaking heartache,
or locating the book you are trying to find, the one you could have sworn
your friend got back to you. Fifteen seconds from now it will fall from
your shelf. If it doesn’t happen, you’ve either traveled ahead in time or back
and I can’t help you but I can tell you where in the city has the best soup.
JEFF WHITNEY's most recent chapbook is Sixteen Stories (Flume Press, 2022). Recent poems can be found or found soon in Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and Sixth Finch. He lives in Portland with his wife.