BIRTHDAY 2000
It’s the day before my birthday
and I’m working on a poem
A poem about how it’s by pain that most
people got all the learning they got
and how I’d rather not
My mother invites me along to visit some
friends of hers in the country
He is walking around on a cane
all stove up from being thrown off
the four year old gelding he’s breaking
Forgetting anything I should have been
learning from my poem
we put on his wrong size saddle
and I climb on to show him a thing or two
And I do, I show how high you can go when
you get bucked off backwards and rump
tossed and land hard on hard packed ground
how to jamb a shoulder and break some ribs
May have learned something, time will tell
one thing for sure, when I wake up the next
morning it isn’t like one of those birthdays
that just slip by
This time I feel at least a year older
maybe a millennium