December 20, 2022

BYOF *

It’s a new day. Bring your own fork. Bring your own footwear. Bring your own 
fragrance, your own faith, your flamboyance, your fetishes, your fashionable lateness.
Become your own fantasy. Be your one friend. Believe yesterday was only a fragment.
Make a betrothal of yeses on fortune. Brush last year’s offenses free. Banish 
your outdated fury. Breathe. Yearn. Opine. Flex. Or bleat. Or yodel. Or remember
how to be frivolous. Break yourself out of what no longer fits. Bloom. Occupy your body
as it were flowering perennially. Write your blessings down, or yell them, opulently, 
into the span of a quiet forest. Brave the yeti of an old fear. Bulldoze the yoke 
of what’s keeping you fixed. Burn the yardstick, the odometer, the flagrant shames. 
Build your radiance from the flames.

* The idea and title for this week’s poem comes from Michelle Vanstrom, a participant in one of my recent “Right Here, Right Now” Zoom writing sessions.