Daylight, you are heavy. A father’s hand pushing on my forehead.
Mad mother, squeezing me too tightly, sibling stretching
my tired legs; daylight, you pull me, like a mule pulls a cart.

Memory is sand being shaken in a soup can.
Easy roads are gutted by fallen trees. I do not remember
them falling, when was it they fell?
I use to walk this street when I was young, but now it ends.

Still I carry a pamphlet Star Finder in my back pocket,
even as I know the world has created a device
in which I only have to swing my pointer finger over a screen
to watch the heavens spin.

The sun is unforgiving. I might beg it to stop shining
but it will still shine. Boil my shoulders, make the oil in my hair
glint and glow. Photons tugging at my earlobes.

Still I walk often, despite hot summer. I see joggers bob past,
bicyclists moving as smooth bolts of pedaling lightning.

They are dressed for the occasion, the occasion
of getting fit. I wear flats with holes in them, a tank top
large enough to be a dress, my armpits unshaved, my pace
slower than the squirrels. An unattractive hat.

Memory is water being poured from one glass into another.
Most will make it in, but some droplets will cling, hang on
to their home. But I am clumsy;
many times I have had important items splash out onto the floor.

My walk is not going well. We cannot halt things by moving,
yet I continue to act as though I still believe it.

They will catch up. For I must sleep, but some things
never do. I think maybe, the heat will burn it all away, an
evaporation, stealing the lives I cannot outrun.

You are weighted down, self who sits on my chest.
I pull out my folding knife, the knife I have had since I was 13.
Cut off a bit of string, hanging from my pant leg.
Everything I own is frayed.