future retrospective

i bookmark moments
try to keep track
of how quickly time passes

wonder how things will turn out
wait
for the punch line

this too will pass...

i remind myself

and

...everything happens for a reason.

but i click back to the moments
just before crisis
far enough to not miss my cue
and i
regret
with a vengeance

... and i don't believe in that shit
i really DO believe that everything happens
for a reason
it helps me sleep at night
gives me something to curl my fingers around
when i try to understand
why two year olds die
why babies cry when you've done EVERYTHING you can
and they can't tell you what's wrong
why i cannot for the life of me get it right no matter how hard i try
and how sometimes i don't have to try at all
and pieces just fall together

drop twenty dollars
and get a winning scratch ticket
buy a homeless man a hot dog
and sleep through the night for the first
time in two weeks
you can't always trace it back
like trying to explain how you got to
your favorite hat when we were
talking about where we might have
been when the challenger
exploded
and our tiny baby brains mistook it
for fireworks
linked it in our heads with
punky brewster
and crying.

point a to point b
is a long journey
that sometimes we're
right in the middle of
i'm not saying that b is death
there are so many ab's in this rhyme
scheme
that i rap sometimes
just trying to figure it out

and i bookmark moments like these
remember the thought
when the punch line finally hits
make a note
write a play or a poem
cast myself in my own life
on repeat
write scripts in my sleep
trace the freckles on my arms
to make maps
of all the crazy lines
that life draws when no one else
is looking