From Rattus: Why Not Let (poem)
Why Not Let
You have to choose things, and delay is not a choice
You occupy a desk
Your daily life is work and doesn’t work
And something like a four-foot space
Holds all you see the whole of most your days
Your back-vulnerable confrontation with outsiders
Ought to have you thinking more of asteroids
How the fits and outbursts grew to be ubiquitous
How a thousand grandmothers of grandmothers patrolled
barefoot in ash, small you advanced as shrieking horror
to kaleidoscopic fowl and insects even stalking cats
you at your mother’s tail, in the way of creatures
with tails attached
why not let all the motions
all the yarns unskeining
all the arms and legs of battlefields
fingering and toeing at the sky
rising hid among the tampered corn
lending poignancy to your morning chance
to catch that show you’ll think about all day
why not let this complicated clock
tick to the hour of its detonation
you have made a difference to the world
or you have not
October
(2019, Stephanie Foster)