On your back you can see them
your futures like a palimpsest of clouds
Over a woad of sky obscured
cumuliform and cuneiform
mare tails question
What do you do?
Asking not with cocktail party patrony
but with a whinny of helplessness
as when you ask yourself
What do I do?
Behind them all the roiling
glaciers of sun reaching through
A couvade of space only to be
halted by this fish fleshed firmament
Mammatus and anvils in the wings
their stilted dialogue belies the social
workings before each phrase
Are you?
Asked almost five hundred times
with eyes with chin with stand
With hold with draw with child-
like honesty a similitude of courtesy
when clear skied you asked
What would I do?
Fate and fret locked and swelling
winds gall a mare’s nest of clouds
Telling you this sky is cirrus
and woulds blow out while wills blow in
and weather or not you need an answer
What will you do?
As first published in Neglected Ratio
