(Photo by author.)

Exercise

POEM

🎵: “Midlife Crisis” by Billy Lemos, Tati

After I realized there’s no other way to guarantee the correct format of this poem will be enjoyed by everyone who reads it, I decided to put a screenshot of the poem first. ✌️

Exercise

Everyday.
Every muscle.
Eat rations plated perfectly, eye nutritional facts.
Evolutionary wonder, dig your hole and chortle to the
elegant audience’s direction turning soil under thin glass
elevated sunshade, punching heart through your chest.
Earned coins make all worthy of bruise, too, warped iris.
Etched, shaken, removed. Blast off the block, big stride,
Earth sliced a new early glimmer, another, another day
eroding for sake of continuity, but woe, you are so shot,
even the nicer face are diluting blur. Whipping o’er old
elephant’s hurdles for weekends, chomp chomp chomp,
eat your bacon bits and corn, zoom. You and whisperers
end up a whippersnapper at neckbreak speed, whiplash.
Exploding calves, fall with eloquence, hip first, in, out,
echoes of the bedtime, say goodnight, good morning sir.
Ever never frown the sound; bounced off softest foot-
extruded blankets before the outside flare has even
exited its sweated covers, step. Curse the forced pressure
eloquent tongue and babble on dribble for a paragraph
eternal while you scavenge on the scrounge for sentences
expired. Play, cry, flip, emanate, drive, hike, stroll, scroll,
East, West, rise, lift, push, turn, sit, rest, read, tear,
envelope every cup of existence in big volume, or fade.
Emails, expectations, scraping in constant checkmate.
Eight day for the price of two, shrug the inside voices, O
exterminator of weakness, and pirouette bravehearted
each discounted week for the keys and credits. Thread
enamel, one by one through twenty, on, music quieting
ears ringing with flocks of pissy boy’s parrots, dream.
Either live it or don’t, player.