Passing Thought
The way a body plummets off
a balcony twelve floors to the marble
below, you, the unformed fragment
of something I was going to say,
blurred silent past me, not falling so much
as moving like a body through a crowd,
slow enough to notice, though
too quick to follow.
Nice to wonder for a moment what
you might have become.
Exactly
what I’ve wanted to say the way
I’ve wanted to say it?
Doubtful.
If I could ever bring such a thing
into being
surely it would crumble
under the pressure of its own weight.
These Days
I can’t escape feeling days are more
real now than before; my aims missing
their marks, disappointment being the heart
of what I have to cling to; my own version
not of newness necessarily,
but ongoing difficulty.
(Streets lined with new leaved trees
again.) The further along I go the greater
difficulties appear. Still, morning imparts
upon my body, my mind, the burdens of waking.
Justin Marks has poems in, or forthcoming from, Fulcrum, The Literary Review, Typo, Black Warrior Review, McSweeney’s, Word For / Word, Kulture Vulture, and others. His chapbook, You Being You by Proxy, is out on Kitchen Press. He is Editor of LIT magazine and lives in New York City.