Damned Spring

Jesse Doiron

July 9, 2023

Damn the spring. I am a winter man, 

old and withered, ready now to fall. 

All the sap has dried inside of me, and 

the only green I show is vile bile that  

seeps and oozes slow out of my holes. 

I see no reason for the sky to smile,  

or breezy airy clouds, or rain to puddle,  

or birds to wander their ways back.  

Butterflies and fireflies try my soul. 

Squirrels fucking in the trees disturb. 

Buds bounding out of stems confound. 

The yard grows fast its fat sweet grass, 

and the neighbors walk in the morning, 

calling out “Hello” and “How are you?” 

Some stop to talk to me so cheerily of 

nothing more important than the day, 

the beautiful, rising, sun-filled day,  

with its faint, lingering scent of oxygen, 

and the laughter of children at play, 

and someone’s dog barking far away, 

and bicycles spinning quietly by with 

healthy and happy and handsome 

women, whose fulsome breasts roll 

over their firm pink forearms as they 

glide themselves along the road that  

bends so pleasantly in front of my house,  

where they wave to me, always delightedly;  

although, I’m all gone gray and grim and grave,  

and I am damned unhappy that it’s spring. 

Jesse Doiron spent 13 years overseas in countries where he often felt as if he were a “thing” that had human qualities but couldn’t communicate them. He teaches college in Texas, now, to people a third his age. He still feels, often, as if he is a “thing” that has human qualities but can’t communicate them.