The Usual Birthday Poem

is about the central fact, your birth, to be considered in any story
of who you think you are or the closest you’ve ever been to fiction.
You can see snow piling up simultaneously with sun coldly shining.
There are limits, though: places you lived, and she you shared with.
Is it normal to want to be as many round characters who aren’t obese
as it is to lose weight and run again, no matter where or with whom
you are? I’d as soon be here and alive as anywhere; especially alive.
Seventy-five years ain’t nothing on Methuselah. Another twenty-five
and I’ll likely be gone, surely. If not, with the aches and pains of age,
why would I not be intent upon engineering levees for the next flood?

(31 December 2013)


copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander