Wind exhausts with its icy fists.
Knives of rain wear me down, &
leaves in their helicopter swirls
like leaflets dropped from a plane.
October depletes me, & November.
They’ve too much busyness.
They send me spinning, dancing,
lonely with the rake, the broom.
I surrender, collapsing like an old barn,
debris of me piling in a chair
with clear view of the television.
News is on. It spends me.
Talk of politics, also. I’d like
to shut up the voices that fatigue.
They hum like a B-flat in the pipes.
They bicker & scold, condemn.
They expend me like carrying
groceries up a flight of stairs
until I’m too drained to care
which side they’re on.
---
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.
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