It surprises me
To find
Everything adjacent to my pain
Still hot to the touch
As if neurons could conduct heat
From one year to the next
And the degrees of separation
Don’t matter
If I can quickly trace the line
From a song
back to days that left me rough-hewn from loneliness
It doesn’t matter
If the years changed my face
And my lungs
Shook blue from the sky
If the curl of a tv smile
Can stoke a memory back into flame
I can wish that my body weren’t a Time Machine
But it will always feel June like a trap door
August like an I-5 meridian
Maybe I deserve it,
The purgatory of my own thoughts
I won’t deny that
Karma is a bitch
But hey,
Time is, too.