I Have Wasted My Life
after James Wright
There it goes, thin thing,
cheshiring between trees
whose reaper-robes trail
their trains deep underground:
your life, hangin out
like an exposure. Easy now.
It’s your posture I’ve followed here,
summerful hump of it, Sunday spoil—
as if anything could happen in this moment
to anyone else. Your life is that horror
scene in which the girl is roped
between a trailer and a semi:
its ruby cab entered, the pistol
presented, the engine
set to gun, the clutch
at the mercy of a muscle
at the mercy of a mind
at the mercy of a trigger
at the mercy of a mind
at the mercy of the clutch—“You
useless waste,” jibes the killer
to the waste who cannot kill
while caught in mercy’s
Celtic knot, its spun
swastika. How swiftly
inevitable, cuts her loose, jams
another truck in front—there I go
from oblivion, let-offing toward a road,
windmilling for rescue. No,
I alighieried down this sunken navel
to also cape for waste.
Yes, me, with my black life,
gray Negro face, ever-tried. Treed.
Ammercy between amens.
I have a thickness
to lean against death’s
heavy, urgent function
like a terrific fiction. I will lie
here and swing open: heavens
as a throttle opens,
hapless as the silent gazebo,
revulsion and reverie equally
mine to hold in this slim
acreage the tidal sun
sidles across. The briefly lit
dog shit, the grace
of mean geese unzipping
the brown pond, fly-eyed
cult of lotus pods
neighbor-nosing over the bank,
the shiver underneath
my ruined shirt, the worm
eating of things in the dirt
the dead and the living,
every slaughter such serenity
ever cost is the life
I have wasted. I’m about it.
I can do this all day.
Justin Phillip Reed, "I Have Wasted My Life" from The Malevolent Volume. Copyright © 2020 by Justin Phillip Reed. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press, www.coffeehousepress.org.
