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
[End Poem]
Marcus Jamison, the Rare Poet
