smitten from the star[t]

when hometown homies during the holiday season

gather ‘round town, 

for no particular reason, 

trust,

your name is getting mentioned.

yes.

it’s getting uttered,

it’s getting dragged,

it’s getting whispered in hushed tones 

begetting groans and manifesting moans.

a series of she’s with her (now),

he’s with him (how?),

and they’re with who? (wow),

as we plow through details, derails, digressions, 

and impressions — all in one session. 

having fallen behind since the fall,

it is now time we catch upward,

into the ethereal expanse established in our  

exchange of what’s changed,

the time and space in between when we last met

and set out to the impossible, the improbable.

nostalgia moans,

derived from “returning home” and “pain,”

deprived, there’s no refrain. 

yet there’s mirth in these masochistic musings,

the pasts and the lasts.

we hatched in the same nest,

our feathers, fumbling the worsts, 

straddling the best days of our lives,

before we took flight.

returning to the roost,

we revel in the revelation of the little and long times coming and gone, 

going on, and on, and on, and off on another tangent.

homely and heaven-sent, we vent,

allowing a serious sequence of earlier events,

to be elongated into soliloquy 

or ushered into a single short sentence.

our words and worlds become water,

a communicative condensation,

an evanescent evaporation eschewing elaboration,

in paraphrasing the phases

the days are diminished,

the weeks withered,

and months unmentioned,

for the sole sake of attention.

hometown homies will gather ‘round

to reminiscence and remember every december,

and till then, I will dwell on the dialogues’ divinity.

for it’s a conversation our Creator had already crafted when we were kids, 

so I don’t kid when I say,

the words we exchanged on that and this day were written in the stars, 

as we were smitten from the star[t].

MiC Columnist Karis Clark can be reached at kariscl@umich.edu.