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)