lxx

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see. 
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

-William Shakespeare

            This cheap wooden cubicle in the library is at least twenty years old, at least as judged by the scratchy dates scrawled into its ancient paneling. There are drawings and messages marked onto the sides, permanently Sharpied down to the corners, forever reminders of students sitting in the same creaky chair as me right now, the only thing that they have left behind.

            I want to leave behind my words, these roman numerals, this physical/digital (depending how this is being respectively read) account of my breaths and trials and shortcomings. And I want to leave behind this poem:

Driving On Sunday Mornings

The favorite part of my week

is that warm of a Sunday morning,

you know, when there’s no one

                      absolutely no one on the roads

and the cement super-highways glisten with their patented chemical dew,

waiting for me.

And I’m just flying down the Interstate,

in my goddamned, beat up mini-van,

the same color of a half-cleaned oil spill in the Gulf.

I’m heading South because

why the hell not?

                               And because

I want to see just how far, exactly, I can really go

without having to step on the brake pedal

or even acknowledge the existence of

another human being.

For that twenty-four-and-a-half minute car ride,

I’m racing down all the skid marks of the week and,

by the end of it,

all that’s left,

all that really matters,

is me

    my God,

    and that sweetest smell of gasoline

    that’s wafting into my swift Sign of the Cross.

            Is that too much to ask?