Say your body’s
life-size trip clock
starts in schlep
on the down slope.
Then the long hand
slaloms you steep
as your face tocks
the take of nine-to-five.
It’s just your timing
and mindset that’s semi-
rattled, and everyone
comes to the skit a little
pusillanimous to begin.
What is a kind of
smudgy justice:
the ancestors’ DNA
in full wig effect,
frizzy edges crimped,
oblivious to wind.
Are you really inside
that mirror slice?
Pacing over past
junkets still, a hybrid
hallucination got
stock-carded into
a being strange to be,
like that griffen
who slips so casual
onto someone else’s
map of laughing tropic
locales. Friend, look hard.
Mix. Step out. The center
bit by bit gets beiged.
You are one hundred
percent half-and-half.
In the hemi is the how.
Copyright © 2018 by Pimone Triplett. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 25, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.