Spilled My Beer

Photo by Anshu A on Unsplash

I spilled my beer all over the coffee table
watching the Warriors with a friend. It
being the playoffs, there was no time
to clean it. In the morning, the smell
of stale beer and the stickiness of life
stuck to the table like an old life one
cannot avoid until

Writing is a lonely affair like skating
along the tops of the treetops, seeing
the forest a vague blob of green, it’s not
until you descend — I descend — into the
long drop down you see the pine needles
and the broken branches and the bark.

We walked in the woods for fresh air
and she took her phone out and discovered
a world of mushrooms, a magic of life
in the dampness ready to be exposed
not on film but on the ever-disposable
collection of pixels and algorithms.

On the way down the trees, I caught my clothes
on branches pointed like spears, pierced
my skin like the fork scraping through the fibers
of a steak being tenderized for the grill.

I don’t know why the tenderizing feels so
scary or how the persona is formed so early
and so hard. You’re not too old to crack because

King Lear on the hearth finally agrees:
“You must bear with me: Pray you now,
forget and forgive: I am old and foolish.”
Well, then he died.
But the ruined, cracked shell reveals
a human being ready to emerge again
raw and this time unwilling to crawl
into a shell. It’s time

I think, to find a rag, and wipe clean
the stale, sticky beer.