Look Me in the Eye and Tell Me That This Is the Year by Jason Abbate

It will be a year of harvesting exclamation

points from the garment district of your mind.

It will be the year you finally buy a used copy

of The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Your Life

for five dollars at the Zing Café. The year when

you’ll decide that you are after all the kind of

person who counts the verbs in your grandfather’s

confession and the next morning when he pretends

to strangle himself, you’ll be the kind of person

paddling the moment’s tireless satire straight up

the future’s fractured sleeves. There or then you’ll

decide that juggling with Orpheus at midnight

cannot possibly be enough. It will be the year

that you start living the way you want to live,

the year you start speaking in the dialect, that

you slam the shutters, straighten the dollar bills,

convince yourself that nothing happens if nothing

collides. Legend says that we’ll all have a part

to play in the great vanishing, the one that

unhinges its jaws beneath everything that

appears entirely irrefutable from inside

your labyrinth of limericks and procrastination.

When the year arrives, you’ll spot the pickpocket’s

trembling knuckles minutes before you call

your dogs home. At the quantum level nothing

is certain, which means that even the least

musical among us can borrow an angel in

our hour of nakedness. When we meet in

the next life, remind me that I promised

this time we’ll be the ones pointing out rude

carvings at the top of the gates, sneaking into

passageways where sticky thumbs hover

over cartons of that impatient flesh we teach

ourselves not to daydream about. If the surgeons

are game, we’ll curl our scribbles into a soundtrack

that will umbrella us against the next world's

nonsense. I'll say I should have told you all

of this the first time. You'll say let's not waste

all this good suffering – meet me at the wrong end

of the ocean – you’ll find my footprints on the door.

____________

Jason Abbate lives and writes in New York City. His work has been featured in publications such as The American Journal of Poetry, Red Rock Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Broadkill Review and Trampoline.