September slinks forward before I’m ready.
The end of summer evades detection.
It pressurizes slowly, gaining pace
only in the waning days of August,
which brings its will-stopping miasma
of code orange soupy drenched air
into the coming calendar sheet.
A magma-hot smoked sausage link,
the month that steamrolls autumn into our lives
rolls toward my unguarded belly.
Threatening to go aerial,
the new month is a taut tube steak,
its smooth-with-steam exterior
cartwheeling over the char-singed grate,
aiming to escape the swim club’s gas Weber.
September brings darker mornings,
and with it, earlier evenings,
more hectic social calendars,
and the promise of some form of explosion:
emotional, social, mental, physical.
I am in denial;
I close my eyes.
"Wake me up When September ends,"
I say, summoning my best Billy Joe Armstrong.
