How a fall breeze feels more restless
than a summer storm is strange to me,
as if the transition between adolescent to other
were somehow completed, and a grotesque
human banality had dunked me into
a very used dunk tank. I bet the man
with his arms crossed, nearly doubled over
on a bench, swollen, probably doesn’t feel this way,
his pain is more immediate
than my lamenting of friends and Eros passed,
or the bankruptcy of selfishness, or the ocean
with all its poison dumped in, raining
all it has as an offering. I bet tonight
he won’t be the one asking for more, as a comfort.
— David Gibbs