“I still feel some crumbs sliding down” by Lynn Michael Martin

I still feel some crumbs sliding down.
I probably shouldn’t have, you know,
but it got me—this thing
that makes some of us fat and most of us
forget to exercise.
It’s part of the human condition,
why, I don’t know, because
it has no evolutionary value,
and we should really have been selected
for hardworkingness.

Or perhaps there is some obscure upside
to not wanting to go to bed at the proper time,
and eating a cookie instead,
just because you were reminded of eating
by your cousin’s olive-puckered mouth.

Like you needed reminding.
Because, after all, evolutionary conditioning
has bred it into your very bones.
Unless, by some strange twist of fate,
it forgot to do that too.

Hmm.
When I think thoughts like this,
I need to be chewing on something,
and I remember that
there was another one at the bottom of the jar.


Lynn Michael Martin lives in Hagerstown, MD, where he helps to edit the Hedge Apple Magazine. He studies British literature and writes poetry and occasionally tries to make music in various ways. His poetry has appeared or is appearing in the Author’s Journal of Inventive Literature, and the Society of Classical Poets Journal.