Howard Firkin
This poem’s ordinary. This is yours.
This one is yours to eat with square, white bread—
the one you don’t remember having read.
It’s white with none: effect without a cause.
It’s ordinary, passé, dull. It’s this.
This time is yours. Unspecial time. The day
when nothing happens, when the rain you were
expecting doesn’t fall, when you’re just her
and I’m the him with nothing much to say,
as passionless as any goodnight kiss.
The atoms that we choose to breathe have passed
through other lungs, through gills, through other pores
a million times as each thing breathed its last.
So this is nothing new. This one’s all yours.
This one is yours to eat with square, white bread—
the one you don’t remember having read.
It’s white with none: effect without a cause.
It’s ordinary, passé, dull. It’s this.
This time is yours. Unspecial time. The day
when nothing happens, when the rain you were
expecting doesn’t fall, when you’re just her
and I’m the him with nothing much to say,
as passionless as any goodnight kiss.
The atoms that we choose to breathe have passed
through other lungs, through gills, through other pores
a million times as each thing breathed its last.
So this is nothing new. This one’s all yours.
