Hope’s a Spaceship!
Our 20s look better from the star right above where we grip onto / flinging / flying off circus re-adjusting anxiety thru hair bangs, bikini and mortgage and wake and wake and wake and wake to dwarf existing into a day if lucky, if not: week or decade. Parking ticket intentionally lost in sedan trunk the new: kiddo feeling exciting summer is coming–now gone: like baby teeth / Pluto’s title being planetary. Aging means most conversations where we’re from or where we’d want to be if there were some pumice-weightless galaxy liberated of time punch, obsessive revelation that evening sky pretty apricot burgundy only cause the neighbors’ neighbors’ neighbors’ hometown is burning. At least you got a job. At least if present then not suffering so as the asteroid hurtles you see white puff jet trail as unhooked pearl necklace rests on atmosphere felt, not path future destroying.
Self Aware in Love
Questions stick: invisible familiar burrs,
rough legible like braille: thoughts about
thinking to undo before what could become
becomes. 2-sided sheet: hiring paperwork
flips to retirement. When is next ambush
in the brain on the brain which backdoors
to no geographic cure? Be clear: you give
you food poisoning. Any relationship 17
relations on each side, at least. Many boys:
one to touch your wrist & one to possess
your dad, out new lips he says I see you.
Sometimes the Us must carry shaky ladder
single-armed. Sometimes the sidewalk
of infatuation a hologram overlaid
with fearing being un-wived before
the wiving. Before the wiving: desire
to attend your own funeral where crowd
lauds, cries while your widower imagines
how better the attention at his burial.
Austin Beaton studied Spanish at the University of Oregon, where he was a finalist for the Walter and Nancy Kidd Memorial Writing Competition in Poetry. His work has appeared in Boston Accent, (b)OINK, Porridge Magazine and elsewhere. He lives near the ocean in San Luis Obispo, California where he swallows figs and gives nicknames.
Occulum 