Preterition

Making up for lost time here: I’ve been uneven about posting. I hope you’ll forgive.

Here’s a winter / anti-winter poem.

Reasons to Survive November

Tony Hoagland

November like a train wreck – as if a locomotive made of cold had hurtled out of Canada and crashed into a million trees, flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.

The sky is a thick, cold gauze – but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown, and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum, full of luminous red barns.

– Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna, the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe, and roll around in her foldout bed.

I know there are some people out there who think I am supposed to end up in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate, a locked door and my slack mouth open like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back from the core of my donkey soul and the hatred makes me strong and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them so I shove joy like a knife into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure, and I love this November life where I run like a train deeper and deeper into the land of my enemies.

(from What Narcissism Means to Me. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2003.)