Postcard to Nostalgia

When did my life become the stuff
of nostalgia? I overheard
a guy in the bar on the corner
ask his friend the other day.
I didn’t know you had a new beau.
And this one’s long distance too.
 
In this new city my barber insists
on cutting my hair to lessen
my thinning, wanting to get
back to a me he didn’t know.
 
He reminds me of my younger brother.
When much younger he sputtered
in the ocean after the first wave
took the land he had been standing on,
waterlogged and hornswaggled,
his goggles now around his neck,
no longer a greenhorn to what’s
to come or what can come to pass.
 
I’ve taken to carrying words
in my pocket on a slip of paper.
Each morning I reconsider them
and again at noon and midnight.
They are my last words or what
I intend them to be.

— Sean Hill