Most every night as a teenager:

my face lit by television,

dull and pastel glaze 

molting from the small screen.

Common comedy. Late-night

talk shows with scripted jubilance. 

Hard not to see these evenings 

as wasted, spent knelt at a vapid altar. 

When the shows melted into infomercials, 

I’d roll my unfinished body

in the shoal-dark. Some future I awaited

approached with the aching pace

of a spoon tunneling into a concrete cell wall,

its mystery as cold and illegible

as snowfall over ocean.