Lessons - Joseph Byrd

I have learned: listen not to the mind first thing in the

morning. Greedy like a basketball shoe for the court, it

scuffs where it should not. I have learned that opening my

6am curtains can turn this thinking inside out like a pair of 

gym shorts, learned that few know how one’s insides shift to

one’s outsides with only a look from you at dinner in

Minneapolis. Aggressive love is so strange, you said,

chewing on goat. Pureness, preciousness, these two

vanish with nothing more than an alarm clock, and I

didn’t wake up beside you as I am always awake anyway.

Do you hear the ways I keep fooling myself about this?

Do you remember when I first saw you again, and was

mainly concerned about food?  Eight years later, I cannot

see you as anything else. I am constantly apologizing for my

appetites. I am no longer sure where to find that. I have learned 

that my kind of courtly love no longer includes lutes, or layups, or

any attempts at timeouts. Something about morning aches. The 

important question: what game did we play last night? I am listening. 

Maybe we played shirts vs. skins. I know which team I prefer. I know 

how to hear where this game is going, even if I long lacked an asterisk 

on my typewriter. I get happy, wanting to make note of what is special,*

contrary to your hatred of my saying so. But postcards have been held 

in my own hands at some point, and I have learned what it means to

touch you this way. I am growing less ashamed to ring your doorbell,

asking if you will play with me, if you will help me learn how to stop 

listening to my mind in the morning. And I will be happy to do anything

you suggest: tea, blood-letting, raucous laughter at the day’s news, going

anywhere with you, even into that narrow, pinching place called love.

*you

Bio: Joseph Byrd’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Punt Volat, Pedestal, South Florida Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, Clackamas Literary Review, Many Nice Donkeys, and Novus Literary Arts. He’s a Pushcart Prize nominee, was long-listed for the Erbacce Prize, and was in the StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar. An Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, he is on the Reading Board for The Plentitudes.

Commentary

I love the stark honesty of this piece. No doubt each inference is striking and I beleive resonates with many of us. The similes are apt with 'gym shorts' and 'alarm clock' being most creative ones, in my opinion (wherein the 'alarm clock' is analogous to 'transience'). Emphasis on the asterisk adds an uniqueness to this piece. The ending is a smooth conclusion.