twenty-eight.

These days, whenever the future
seems fraught
with the moments
that will go wrong and the words
I'll be unable to reel back
into myself like fishing line,
like celluloid, like
the unraveling of a knot,
I picture
zombie kittens.
It has nothing to do
with life
or love
or the universe
or the price of tea,
but since when does that matter?
I repeat the phrase
to myself, imagine
the back of a rented sedan,
lost in the streets
of downtown Philadelphia, halfway
from Jersey to Princeton again.
It's enough, maybe
to know that should I ever decide
to start again,
I'd still have that day.