Peter Schwartz

7 Years

year of the coconut

sorry, if there are more zoos than animals

but you can't afford that kind of dizziness

use my hair to make yourself less violent

but please admit the you they love is small

and can't find his breakfast in the trees

year of the sun

there is a tiredness that ancient conquerors

had to conquer first, if you can wake up already

that gone and still march over yourself into

the daylight, you might still be able to find

your own exhausted corpse

year of the broken chair

hearing your first marathon made you want

to run backwards, but you'd already stepped

in something blurry and headless, a separate

kind of seedless that made you desperate to

immediately reenter the food chain, you just

didn't want that corresponding baptism

year of the match

beware of perfect similarities, nobody's

quite the beneficiary they pretend to be

and playing chameleon doesn't last

year of the cloud

headless, you made your own zoo

up there by the real hereafter

where there is no architecture or medicine

for even the worst cold, where every

drifting one of you is feral

and your metabolism makes wishes

you can't understand

year of the white raft

the drone of your own filter

became too loud, you almost drowned

in your own promised soup, yet some-

how you swam when your trap-

door broke (you had to)

year of the glass eye

nothing's sadder than an empty zoo

so you replaced one eye and built a green-

house to help forget the animals by

planted something you knew

would break, too

Peter Schwartz's poetry has been featured in PANK, Opium, and The Columbia Review.  He's also an artist, comedian, and dedicated kayaker.