On my Twenty-Fifth Birthday

     On my Twenty-Fifth Birthday

This year, I want to lose something.

Not a pound

     or a bad habit

(though I would,

 really),

but something of moderate significance:

my car

     my cell phone

          a notebook of poems finished but never read.

I want to feel an absence; to not quite know

what is in it. To look

at the drive way

     or the bookshelf

knowing I could fill it if I wanted,

knowing there was something I once

wanted more.

I am told I will not be young forever. Already, I feel

the old woman in my skin telling me

what I should do, what I should

not say.

I feel her wrinkled cheeks

inside my cheeks when I wake in the morning.

I see her softening skin in the puddles

when I walk, and she smiles

when I smile. Sometimes I lace my fingers

through the surface to touch her hand.

 

I do not want to lose the old woman. I want

to lose something she thinks

she already knows.