Lucky

I have two tokens and a card:

One I bought
one was chosen for me
and one was given.

Something about your mid twenties and alcohol
on a speak-easy Saturday night
makes you want to confess
all of the untied fragments that
you may have forgotten
living with the lint in your back pocket.

And as you reach in deep to pull out
a conversation
pieces of it spill out onto the floor like
bouncing marbles, rolling
as others trip
over or roll with them,
reversing their sides of that card.

Our histories are pieced together of frames
we choose to keep,
because sometimes we are not collecting
and sometimes we
are not looking.
Through that lens,
sometimes we are living in real time
and not thinking about how this time
will become the last time
or the times before
we realized it would keep us,
because we do not keep it.

Something about whiskey on your leg
and a book made in your hand that
makes you invert your intro
version to a complete exchange of purity.

There I saw, with one blind eye a man can still see
sometimes more than he wants to.
And if my chosen token allows it,
he may see me for the first time
instead of seeing himself.

I bought myself a smile that night,
but she unfolded after I had left the room.