Five Seconds & Breathing

Five Seconds and Breathing

within the first five seconds of breathing

you will be introduced to pain,

life is an

open-handed slap on the ass

and some moments will be primed

for crying

times when trying to get past your own unknowing

will be a crawl, a stumbling

that very first fall

until positioning forward steps becomes

second nature

of course then,

the hard part begins

then you’re forced to take your innocence to school,

abandon it far more often than you should have to,

until by the time you’re supposed to make sense of this,

you’ll feel a bit like a misfit,

a little bit

lonely, more than a

bit out of place, as if

the music keeps playing and

everybody’s dancing, everybody’s

dancing but you,

you….the rebel without a cause,

still struggling to find your way,

they must have removed the clauses

from birth certificates that tell you:

in order to live, you’ll do a lot of dying

because

life is

a suicide, extended,

one long, choking breath that you

try your best to make last

for as long as you can possibly sustain it,

seeking the purest air in the form of love,

and you’ll break yourself in order to obtain it,

the next five seconds of breathing

spent holding your breath, exhaling….

holding your breath, exhaling….

until by the time you’re

old enough to know better,

you’ve already become fatigued,

of course, then

the harder part begins

they never tell you that, the older you get,

the more you’ll try to forget things you swore

you wouldn’t remember,

the next five seconds of breathing

always feel like the longest, spent regretting

five others, that always become five more,

missed chances stick beneath your nails

like dead skin,

old lovers rest like dirt at the meetings of your thighs,

your eyes become

caked with every bad thing you’ve ever been,

and no type of shower can scrub this clean,

but if you’re lucky, you’ll meet someone who

fancies Halloween, so they won’t be so wary of your

skeletons, and maybe they’ll

smile at you, just like February must smile at spring,

cold for so long but now blessed

with new beginning, and when they kiss you

listen to your heartbeat, decipher its lyrics

so that one day you can write them a song,

and when they tell you they love you,

swallow the words, to shield you from the times

you’ll hate yourself for no reason at all,

memorize the way they look at you,

life is unkind when it comes to reflections, and theirs will be

the purest,

hopefully it reminds you that you were

crafted by God, and therefore you’ll live to the fullest,

laughing together loudly, like God does, via thunder,

rumbling across everything each of you has ever considered joy,

treat this laughter like the Dead Sea,

dip yourself under it for comfort,

use it to heal,

so that in the last five seconds of breathing

you will remember exactly

how no pain

feels

[End Poem]

Marcus Jamison, the Rare Poet