Mobile Attic

I come to you live
from the attic, all exposed nails, and the unknown
dimensions I may fall through to seem more and more likely to be just a garage.

I’m trying hard to suspend daydream plans for imaginary lottery winnings.
It’s the same forecast every day though I’ve yet to plot accurately
the shifting patterns and welcome in the unconditional air.

Once my father told me I needed to get in the driver's seat
but he was never one for metaphors so I drove a turnip truck for the county,
all corn-feds and hayseeds and pulling on the occasional bounty.

This was before I attended his almost mattered, the Safety School of Fine Arts,
on the courtroom sketch track until “the guilty look” drew my expulsion.

His portrait I drew still hangs in the hall as witness to my lack of execution,
the oxford sleeves fading off into blank backgrounds.

Now after sealing each loan payment,
I hold the envelope up to the light to study the security design,
and realize where the money is.

It's yet another forbearance awarded after four years of Hi, School!
when identity wrapped in school spirit dissolved like a breath mint with a lobotomic center.

There we read the cautionary tale of a cynic who met a bloody conclusion
and though the cynical among us never believed it, being told so many times
you only have yourself to answer to, the phone rings non-stop inside my head,
an attic of overlapping bigger pictures.

Like when I complained to my shop teacher about misspelling my name
he asked, do you think a Chinese man cares how your name is spelled.
Twenty years later, debt collector Kim has reached a dead end
and I'd like to track down my shop teacher to thank him but the more I try,
the more irrelevant this seems which I think was his point all along.

If everyone is due a midlife crisis,
then these could only be assessed truly on the deathbed
when one is able to do the math correctly.
And if I were to die tomorrow, I suppose mine would be acquiring gasoline for a Friday night,
resolved by a siphon hose and my Dad's truck.

But the end is likely further down the road where retired coaches
hit their stopwatch and cover my eyes with consolation medals.

Then it becomes more problematic sifting through strange fruitless sessions
for anything to match the relative success of waking up.
At what age did you realize Frontage Road is not its name, the planned obsolescence of a haircut, and so on.

I'm just hoping to avoid the ol'
He-lived-among-black-chrome-and-a-car-with-killer-turning-radius obituary
I seem to hear once a week. Maybe it's doled out just once a week and, if so,
I can die on a Monday if I really try.

It's facing mortality, my brother told me, not being one for metaphors
so now I dress the dead in the floral prints I never had the courage to wear.