March

Indulge yourself in a final thought

as the year ends: If you leave her,

the road ahead opens into a midlife reckoning.

No money for the cliched convertible.

The trip to Japan. Holiday shrine

visits with the locals gawking at

the hulking, brooding, balding foreigner

gumming a squid on a stick.

Finding yourself is a luxury good.

Sex on beaches with divorcees.

Old and sweet and slow.

Mutual cumming on cue.

Hair coiled around your fingers. 

Coconut hotel shampoo. Salt licked

off a near stranger’s skin, crotch full of

sacred sand as the tide comes in.

No. Leave your flipflops in the closet, 

stow your sunblock beneath the sink.

Your health isn’t what it used to be.

Your wealth, pathetic and dwindling,

unfortunately is. Nothing ever changes.

Except the things you wish would stay the same.

She changed. Or maybe the way you saw her did.

It’s a new year. Resolve to do something. Do,

not think. But after the first thought claws

itself into conception, the second forms.

The third. A nativity scene of tortured neurons.

Days die. The calendar deforms. 

January, with its resolutions, collapses. 

Hopes crash on February’s shores and

before you know it, here again and

again, forever and again: March.

The thought of it. The reality.

Reading Rumi

Reading Rumi has got me depressed.

Or rather, I’m depressed and a friend

prescribed Rumi. Poetry is cheaper

than SSRIs or a gym membership, 

easier than deciding to leave

your lover to their addiction.

But all the joyful whirling,

the light, the cups overflowing,

the appeals to a love

with a capital L — no, Rumi, sorry.

I had a Beloved but it turns out

I never really knew her and

this, whatever This is,

is nowhere near enough.

Kent Kosack is a writer with recent work in minor literature[s], the Heavy Feather Review, Some Words, and 3:AM Magazine. His novella, Adar's Freedom, is out now with Subtle Body Press. You can read more of his work at kentkosack.net / bluesky: @kentkosack.bsky.social