Not Isn’t

Up to the steps, interest earned is life,
paid is death. Some mobility, unless you toil,
more Paul than Peter, and complicit.
Even then the clocks and calendars get you.
Would failure on Greenwich Ave. tax you today?
Faces in frames would be different,
vices remain, gibberish in the mind remains
but you lost your smell and taste of its aroma.
Pencils grow shorter now that they stopped making them.
I miss the routines of the menial tasks
of my incarcerations: pulling at the tape dispenser,
capping sharpies, threading machines
and cutting them loose to lie. Don’t mention
my commute, watching my city change its story
five times. Ethnicities battle on signs. Cars
are quiet, no smog, normal weather causes
hysteria. I laugh. Now, I love anything young
without exception even while tangled
in the underbrush of persistent dogma.
I’ll live forever in defiance of tangled logic
just to prove a point: alive is good, not isn’t.

Lawrence Bridges’ poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). He lives in Los Angeles. You can find him on IG: @larrybridges and www.lawrencebridges.com