The Hard Ones

I don’t like
the hard ones.
I never was adept
at junior high school word
conundrums, all those maddening

mathematical rhetoricisms bidding you
to calculate how many oranges there’d be
on every other Tuesday in the months of January,
April and September if two cars were to drop seven of them
every sixteen miles between the suburbs of Madrid and Barcelona.

Couldn’t help but
pull a boner, meaning
that in all its hardly subtle
senses. The densities of knowing
more than you could possibly have known

you knew are quite enough to cause a similarly
unavailing psychic flu. And make you think what few
abilities you’d had to sort through chaos and
produce a symmetry have all, like fruit
picked far too long ago to eat,

gone bad. I make these
shapes and rhymes
entirely to rid
myself
of

the anxiety of knowing
nothing. Sparks flew today as I made
way through books and people, subways
and a gloppy pasta lunch. Life was not appeasing
me: it was all resistant tug and sway. And then I saw

the calendar and realized my brother died one less
than twenty years ago today. Understanding
dared me – hunching like a secret
growling mutt residing on
his butt in my gut.

.