i.
I linger in the glass of buildings
when I move in the whipping dashes
of wind that curls around my hair
and lifts cloudy
bodega bags,
that dip
and will continue to be
far longer than me,
and will see
whatever
comes next, which will be
Revelation, Biblical.
Like fuck it. I’m glad.
I get to see even this part.
ii.
I had a friend who jumped off a building
in what seemed to be an innocent turn
of fun, not a gesture of suicide.
But as usual they can often be the same
and he confided in an Ativan daze
that when you plummet, he says, that
everyone in his support group
says, that when you impose your
tiny little everything on the big nothing
you wish you had the ledge
and not what becomes the sure fact
of gravity.
Because dead men
don’t argue theories,
they know that to be in America
is to plummet from a ladder
of men babbling all the way down.
Ryan Thoresen Carson is a community organizer and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. His featured poems come from his manuscript titled An Admittedly Sinking Yacht, which he sees as a meditation on loss and creation in the age of climate change.
IG and Twitter: @ryantcarson