17/30: tell the story backward

Today my prompt is to tell a story backward.

After living two years in Taiwan, I flew back
to my childhood home where my father nursed me
to poor health.  The longer I stayed the more I wept
and the less I ate until the last two weeks I ate soup

or nothing, and never left the house. Your electric words
hatefulled me half to death, so of course I put myself and my dog
in the car and drove two days straight to you
without stopping.  Crept into the house while you were away:

you came home and went to sleep while I hid in the other room.
That night I tried to kill myself.  Came home and we had
a spectacular fight.  Had it again and again for two years
until you started to fuck me again.  You started to love me

again. After we made love, you'd take me to dinner.  Our last date
you asked for my number, we talked for hours outside a closed bar,
then went to dinner where we laughed about wearing the same color shirt,
then went home.  I opened a message on a dating site, looked

at your photos, and marveled how little they looked like you at all.

day 20 pome 18: silver

Ode to the Silver Hair on My Crown:

You weren't there at all, and then
you were, fully formed. That is, there never was
a time in which I saw a hair
half-silver and half-brown. No,
just last week you appeared in the mirror,
no warning, no call, no letter. And I

stared. I thought of pulling you out,
and almost did, I'm sorry to say. But you
were silver, not gray, silver in the way
of stories of magic, perhaps like a
Pegasus hair. I used to believe
in Pegasus, back when I was much
too young for you to appear on my crown.

But here you are, and I, nearly thirty,
have already accepted that I am not
immortal, nor magical like Pegasus. At least
you are silver and shining, not dull,
not flat, not a white that might yellow,
and so you shall stay, in order to teach
your sister around you how to shine, for soon

enough I will be forty, then fifty, and then
one day, dead and forgotten but perhaps
if I can leave this life as a Pegasus
none of that will matter. Shine on.

8/30: last minute (get it b/c it's about time)

The difference between climate and weather is time.
Temporal measurement, or cronometry, takes two forms,
and the short story is:
calendars versus clocks. They say time
began to be measured first
around 12,000 BCE with calendars based on the moon and
around 45 BCE they switched to the sun. Clocks
turned up around 1,500 BCE, and I say:

fuck 'em all. I hate time, hate
everything about it. Hate dates, hate deadlines,
hate schedules, to me, time
is an illusion and as far as I'm concerned
I've no interest in suspending disbelief. I mean,
explain to me how you are 9.5 hours away
by a clock but how many days
would it take me to get to you if I tried?
Meanwhile, by a calendar you're a good
five months away. We've been dating just shy
of two years, but I feel that you know me
well enough for a lifetime, and while it's only been
two and a half weeks since I saw you it feels
like it's surely been a full year. I hate

this time, this distancing, limiting time, want us both
to step out of this dimension altogether,
into the next, like lines becoming circles,
circles becoming spheres we will ellipse on out
into a place where there is nothing between us,
no calendars, no clocks, no space, no lines,
no time.