In weeks and years I’ll be older, but I’m already feeling too old. I look at faces smiling at other faces and think I could do that too. The movement of your own limbs, looking at your feet and making them move, isn’t that something? I want to walk into a restaurant alone and sit at a table and order and wait and eat and pay and leave. I want to get in a car with someone, drive for hours, and not worry. I point out billboards, people, trees and houses, all of this to distract me, all of this noticing. The tattoo I have is actually to tell me I could be happier. There’s a Joe Wenderoth poem about nailing a leaf to a door with a sign that says LEAF and you leave it there until it becomes so old and dry and fallen apart that it is no longer itself. You return to the door and the sign and the leaf weeks or years later and now the door says LEAF because there is no more leaf. Or maybe the door says DOOR...or the wall says DOOR. I can’t remember. My memory retains too much of the hard little things and I wonder if this is why dreams don’t come to my sleep easily and why, when they do, I feel like they really happened-- why, when they do, they feel like memories. I nail a sign to my dreams that says MEMORIES and I leave it there for a few years.
-- David Wojciechowski is the author of Dreams I Never Told You & Letters I Never Sent (Gold Wake, 2017) and the chapbook Koniec (End) (Greying Ghost, 2023). His poems can be found in Bateau, Bending Genres, HAD, Meridian, Sporklet, and elsewhere. David works as an adjunct instructor and freelance graphic designer, and he’s the host of the David Has Zoom Pro for a Few Months Reading Series.