Set Your Watches
Inspired by Maira Kalman’s painting,
“The Sun Will Explode.”
Set Your Watches.
Unless you are Jesus, your father makes love to your mother
So that his infinite spermatozoa penetrates her
finite ovum.
You are a zygote.
You are a fetus.
You are an infant unborn.
She requestsDEMANDS pineapple AWHOLEPINEAPPLERINDLEAFANDALL
IDON’TCAREIF IT IS 11PM TOHELLWITHYOURBOWLINGGAMERUSSELL!
PINEAPPLE! NOW!
You are born one sticky greengold hour, hospital windows
glaring “Glory Hallelujah” on a secular child.
Set Your Watches.
Your father and mother Kodachrome, Kodak, and Polaroid your
plush chubs; cartoon boom boone on pots, pans, boxes
you find more pleasurable than the toys once housed
within.
You play for hours in quiet steel dark.
You and your sibling get along well. ENOUGH! Well enough for
pillowforts, tears, giggles, backtickles, picturekisses,
warnings
and
punches.
Your first death began your rites of passage
Your rites
of spring ing into
A-Ha Youth.
He is a good boy.
He is a mutt whose make you cannot now quite recall. Lab?
Terrier?
You weep in your father’s lap, holding as tears tear out.
Finally:
almost a man.
Set Your Watches.
Your first kiss is a summertime monument of naïveté and
hormones. She likes your Barney The Purple Dinosaur tshirt. Where he is eating
children surrounding.
You ask politely. She nods. You taste
Lust, love, butterfly tummy flutters, and her Capri-Sun
tongue discovered.
You say the words “I love you” in the dining hall after 2
days.
Your miscellaneous memory making moments memorialize the
truth and beauty of your First You, the You you Now Know and call your Own.
“To Be Alive” and glowinthedarkstars pinned on your hoodie’s
arm mean something to you.
You experience experiences stretched between stupid youth
and graceful independence, riding your bike in the middle of midnight, middle
of the street.
You sneak out over wet leaves like plopdown stars and nod a
solace that you did You right.
Your first depression. Sadness. Blue. Heartache. Malaise.
Ennui….
Whatever.
Whatever you call it, y-you do not care. The only peace you
find is in playing one song you play one. two. three. four. five. six. seven.
eight. nine. ten. eleven. twelve. thirteen. times in a row, then sleep.
sleeep.
sleeeee.
Set Your Watches.
Still feeling 17, feeling print not script, feeling
bumblebee dance and swerve, feeling alone and facing a wrong way, maybe; it may
be that you are eventually, finally, unfortunately, gleefully an
adult.
You are not yet ready to just call them once a week from a
tattoo without tasting their cooking. Nor now yet ready to see friends rare,
rarely, rarer.
See friends now not.
Friends now not see.
Now see friends not.
Not now see friends.
Never.
And you do not know any answers to every question
about legacy and taxes and selfishness and smiles and
smiling and the death of you
and the death of Earth and the death of Sun and the death of
the depth of your sadness, while you shuffle—off.
You instead take pieces of peace parsed by stars unseen and
omnipresent illumine.
You know that you live each fivebillionth of each second
with breath refreshing and
grins galoring before setting
your watch.
Set Your Watches,
mindful of the now no more time.
Set Your Watches.
