NINTH AND FIRST ON TWENTY THIRTEEN

Eighty-two, ninety-two, two-thousand-and-two,
twenty-twelve, twenty-twenty-two. How many
years from here would it take to get there for you.
From where I sit and this is writ the answer would
be nine. In twenty-forty-four when I'm seventy-eight
I should be feeling fine.

I don't want to tempt fate I want to anneal it and kneel
before it to implore it that before it gets fully settled in
or set in stone would it be okay to stall foreclosure on
a loan made in advance when we couldn't have known
all the facts in the case of the passage of time that for
sixty-two years might erase all we found?

So I'm learning to listen just because it hasn't answered yet
how much you wanna bet the older we get the better we get
at discerning the whispering wind from a friend and the other
way round when your brother's not around yet you hear him
in your ear speaking clear out loud beneath the cloud covered
crowded stars.