Michael Passafiume

some things I’ll never learn

how to fold
a fitted sheet
how to say yes
or no without
guilt
how to wait
how to play
the drums
how to speak
Italian
maths
what the homeless man
crawling the length
of the subway car on his
hands & knees meant when
he looked up at me & said,
Who told you to come
here?
why my wife never left
a suicide note
&, if she did, where she
left it
how to sleep
again
why my college theater
professor told me to never
have any regrets because
I’ve got lists
how to walk these city
streets like I’m not late
for an in-office procedure
like I wouldn’t steamroll
small children & the infirm
to spare myself the monotony
of the subway platform shuffle
you know, how to walk like
a normal person
how to sew my own
voodoo dolls
how to sew
how to be
where the last 40 years
have gone
(see above re:
how to be)
where to effectively bury
this desire to light up
because it’s been more
than four years since my last
cigarette but Jesus
today
where to dig up
my desire
how to put all of the pieces—
jagged, spinning, nearly out
of reach—back together
what my father’s final words
to me might have been
you see he had lost
consciousness by the time
my brother & I arrived
his shrunken form swimming
in that hospice bed & when
I’d seen him last he had already
moved his mind to a small
island off the coast
of nowhere & wasn’t accepting
any visitors
but I like to think
he would have
told me

Michael Passafiume is a Brooklyn, NY-based writer who received his MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. A former poetry co-editor at Lunch Ticket, his work has appeared in Book of Matches, Jet Fuel Review, Madcap Review, Stone Poetry Quarterly and Welter Online, among others. His chapbook, archipelagos, was published by Blue Hour Press in 2015.