In those dim grassy
harp-infused summers, we
longed for gray days
in redemption of living well,
the irony cloaked in
naïve dissolution.

We rejected willy-nilly
all that was pre-primed, packaged,
brightly colored.

For us, the rough edge, the ill-fit,
the soiled and discarded,
dust-blown cowboys
blues men smelling of urine
pawn shops, dives,

anything
dismissed and mistreated,
we imagined our own.

How we trotted out our patchy
lives, how we dwindled in our
constructed agony,
tethered all along
to a safe and sorry fate
we could not quite discard!

Is it a kind of hubris
to deny good fortune?

Or is it mere antithesis,
the dark side of a moon
unworthy of its borrowed shine?