I Have Wasted My Life

By Justin Phillip Reed

     after James Wright

There it goes, thin thing,
              cheshiring between trees
                            whose reaper-robes trail
                            their trains deep underground:
              your life, hangin out

like an exposure. Easy now.
              It’s your posture I’ve followed here,
                            summerful hump of it, Sunday spoil—
                            as if anything could happen in this moment
              to anyone else. Your life is that horror

scene in which the girl is roped
              between a trailer and a semi:
                            its ruby cab entered, the pistol
                            presented, the engine
              set to gun, the clutch

at the mercy of a muscle
              at the mercy of a mind
                            at the mercy of a trigger
                            at the mercy of a mind
              at the mercy of the clutch—“You

useless waste,” jibes the killer
              to the waste who cannot kill
                            while caught in mercy’s
                            Celtic knot, its spun
              swastika. How swiftly

inevitable, cuts her loose, jams
              another truck in front—there I go
                            from oblivion, let-offing toward a road,
                            windmilling for rescue. No,
              I alighieried down this sunken navel

to also cape for waste.
              Yes, me, with my black life,
                            gray Negro face, ever-tried. Treed.
                            Ammercy between amens.
              I have a thickness

to lean against death’s
              heavy, urgent function
                            like a terrific fiction. I will lie
                            here and swing open:                    heavens
              as a throttle opens,

hapless as the silent gazebo,
              revulsion and reverie equally
                            mine to hold in this slim
                            acreage the tidal sun
              sidles across. The briefly lit

dog shit, the grace
              of mean geese unzipping
                            the brown pond, fly-eyed
                            cult of lotus pods
              neighbor-nosing over the bank,

the shiver underneath
              my ruined shirt, the worm
                            eating of things in the dirt
                            the dead and the living,
              every slaughter such serenity

ever cost is the life
              I have wasted. I’m about it.
                           I can do this all day.

Copyright Credit: Justin Phillip Reed, "I Have Wasted My Life" from The Malevolent Volume. Copyright © 2020 by Justin Phillip Reed. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press, www.coffeehousepress.org.