Tomorrow at Ten

I’ll have a problem walking in. Beyond that,
I’m good, my heart a dull little apple learning
to swagger like an eggplant, just on the inside.
I’ll be wavering on a street corner, caught
in someone else’s tourist photo and framed
for a desk in Italy. Over there, the convenience
store has one toy, the Electronic Gorilla,
“Funny,” but guaranteed to be bellicose again
and again, throw tiny chrome arms in the air.
What heart can it have but one the size
of a peanut, reserved for toys and dictators?
A man starts each day descending to the basement,
stands a full minute with eyes closed, his back
to a wax Jack the Ripper. With this, each day
is a bonus. Heaven has too much sparkly shit
each time he pictures it. It’s all about being alive.
An explorer hollers into a squall, her placement
on a particular cliff edge the product of one
slightly melted compass, one dented heart.
A Belgian man is in a coma twenty-three years,
conscious without anyone knowing, dreaming
his own comfortable jungle, the click-clack
of a stretcher, his favourite metal insect on the wall.
We are what we repeatedly do, Aristotle said.
And people have been saying it ever since.

—ALEX BOYD

(Originally published Christmas, 2010.)