HALF

Having, by any actuary's reckoning,

logged half the days due me, here I hunker

in the chilly gloom of my third mortgage,

shivering and doubting the wisdom of this dead

pledge: petty rent-seeker and prompt payer

of bills, fetcher of foodstuffs, keeper of the dulled blade

of concupiscent bliss, alchemic converter of hours

into shekels deferred for the decades

ahead. When did I grow so prudent,

when tripped I over the threshold

dividing fresh from old, when did contingent

thoughts lodge, throttle and square this cold

shoulder to the wheel? Numb and dumb,

I hold a lit candle to my quivering palm.

I hold a lit candle to my quivering palm

and marvel at the metacarpals dark

against an orange lantern glow—then jerk

the hand aloft before the skin begins

to sizzle. Had pain the power of a balm

to turn tortured thought away from work

and aim it on the path of art or at some mark

more worthy than the burthens of a citizen,

then might I persist, burn black the skin,

obliterate the fortune-teller's lines

and bear the molten stigma like a blaze

while I wander nameless among pines

and cedars, unheeded prophet of unknown

gospels, wending along dim holloways.

Gospels of wind along dim holloways

blow, and no prophet there to hear them;

footsteps on the stone of cthonic hallways

echo, and no homeless there to fear them;

pastures abandoned to spruce and grey jays,

with no pioneer's handsaw to clear them;

directors stage cycles of mystery plays,

but no audience shows up to cheer them;

councillors conspire to deflect sun's rays,

and no activists gather to jeer them;

slouching toward man's penultimate days,

like Zeno, we can only draw near them—

My friends, this is the way the world ends:

nothing is shattered, but everything bends.

Nothing is shattered, but everything bends

beneath the weight of airborne drops of ice.

Birches bowed over the track scrape ends

on this train's steel and glass as we pass

through a light-latticed tunnel. No passengers

sit in the dome to take in this marvel;

they're all in the wifi zone, tapping messages

of all-caps outrage at the late arrival

announced, wailing like Lear at the weather.

A heavy branch glances off the glass dome.

I flinch, but settle into the leather

of my seat, bound to wait this out. Bound home.

Half of my days are spent away

in a limbo zone between go and stay.

In a limbo zone between go and stay

is where our hero finds himself at home,

less foreign, least strange; starring in a staged play

on steel wheels, your working-class-hero-cum-

boho-hobo-cum-minor-magnate struts

and frets, stumbles, sways, lurches and lunges

through the switches, crossings and slack action

of his days. Gravity and inch-high flanges

keep this rolling show on rails gauged to ruts

in Roman roads, which is to say the way

is wide as two horses' rumps, a fraction

of which—one half, I'll own—you'd fairly say

our hero is, bytimes. Bytimes, he earns

our trust and love. Bytimes, he even learns.

Trust and love, bytimes, even I have learned

to honour, however strange they might be

to my soul—a notion I've a half-mind

to dismiss, since soul is nothing I can see,

flipping by-catch in a neural net designed—

if that conceit my judgment might concede—

to keep this body breathing. I have yearned—

yea, even burned—for purpose, for meaning

beyond bare-forked, basic need to light me

down this darkling road toward gold-greening

rolling fields, clear streams and feral orchards

dropping windfall fruit free for my gleaning—

but snap back from dreaming to data and facts.

No haphazard drift can sanctify profane acts.

No haphazard drift sanctifies my profane acts,

therefore have I made this drift my mission

statement to the stars, whose distant fission

fuels my hours and lifts dim cataracts

of mist from the bustled harbour narrows,

above which sit my debt-beleaguered homes.

The water and the interest rate arrow

ever upwards, precipitation comes

slashing crabwise at my asphalt shingles,

unraked rotting leaves festoon the flower

beds. Across the Northwest Arm, the Dingle

Tower pokes through fog. Church bells toll the hour.

The balance of my days are beckoning—

Half, by any actuary's reckoning.