When we were kids we made a game
of holding our breath, fingertips clamped on
sun-soaked concrete as we plunged underneath,
counting seconds in the silence, jitters rising,
hold our panic, hold our panic, until we
broke the surface and gasped for air,
screaming ‘thirty-seven seconds!’
and panting as we readied to try it again.
And so it was that I’d survive your love,
games of endurance and conscious
starvation, I can subsist on so little, held
my panic, felt the thrill and the stillness,
balled up fingertips, counting seconds,
until that surface shattered, too.
And there was air, and I drank it,
etched lines in the concrete around
what’s love and what isn’t, lost
track of time in the fullness, in
the wide-open air, under sun, to
be alive not the same as surviving.
michael king 