Bony Shoulders
A setting sun with broken clouds:
three sisters grim and spinning with you
as you write another entry in your cursed record.
How much wasted life?
Your self-help angel (former flagellant) advises,
Talk to your own wicked self
as if it were your fiend.
Your friend, I mean.
Too cozy to embrace.
You roll your die of life. Six faces:
Love, Art, Sex,
Death, Death, and Death.
You don’t trust happiness:
balloon snagged in a thorn tree.
Money only pads life’s corners.
Daggers everywhere.
An old friend’s sick,
so smart and sensitive,
but fending off sure death.
The die keeps rolling on its bony shoulders.
Thomas Zimmerman (he/him) teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review https://thebigwindowsreview.com/ at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Website: https:/thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 