Phil Kaye's "Beginning, Middle, & End" (2011)

I present to you all, my secret lover, Phil Kaye... Granted, he doesn't yet know that we are lovers, but trust me, he will. 

"Beginning, Middle, & End"

Every great story
has a beginning, middle, and ending –
not necessarily in that order.

We are all great stories.

Chapter 389:
The boy, hair still long, fingers still too short, is 98 years old.
He sits at a restaurant alone.
The stranger next to him is eating something that looks vaguely delicious, so
the boy takes his fork, sticks it in his meal, and takes a bite.
He says, “I am 98 years old…go ahead, say something, asshole.”

Chapter 14:
The boy is eight years old; he and his best friend
come up with a great idea for a prank; they are sure they will not get caught.
The next morning, every house on the street – except his own – has toilet paper on the front yard.
They get caught.

Chapter 146:
And the boy and the girl live happily ever after.

Chapter 231:
And the boy and the girl vow never to speak to each other again.

Every great story has a beginning, middle, and ending –
not necessarily in that order.
We are all great stories, but not all written as chapter books.
I know that there are moments not meant to be bound,
that we scribble too much in the margins to read our own page numbers.

Like the night you thought you were invincible,
ran out into the lightning storm with a million keys tied to a million kites, and
a clench in your jaw that said, “Take me with you, goddammit, I dare you.”
And the week you finally reached out to feel your father’s cheeks
and just found paper cuts.

I know the nights we shatter hourglasses to fall asleep,
the afternoons we take photographs of our own shadows
just to prove that we left a mark.

I know the wetness of your lips.
I know that you are the leaf off of the tree of your parents’ first kiss,
and if you hold your shrubs to the sky, you can see their veins there.
I know that in later chapters, you will complain
about how things were better back in your day.

Give yourself lots to complain about.

And know that your legs were made to run, your bones were made to heal,
so let yourself fall so deeply into somebody else that you do not know
which way is up,
knowing that one day, you may fall out –
know exactly which way is down.
Call your mother crying as the first day you were born.
“Baby,” she will call you, “Baby, it’s okay. Every great story has a beginning, middle, and ending,
not necessarily in that order.”

Chapter 189:
The boy, too old now to celebrate his birthdays and too young to treasure them,
uses his fists.
Punches his own reflection to see if it is real,
breaks his hand back into the opposite of a fist, a conch shell of sinew.
He holds it to his ear and can hear the ocean of his own bloodline:
“Stand up, boy, not just with your legs.
You, be your own story, six hundred words per minute.
You, glasses  by age seven.
You, never stopped to read the back cover even though you know
what happens at the end.”

Chapter 431:
Once upon a time, there was a boy.
He is not here anymore, but the branches he left all hold their leaves to the sky,
and you can see the outline of his shadow on the sidewalk.

Chapter 1:
Once upon a time, there was a woman and a man,
and the first night they kissed, a seedling blossomed from the back of her neck.

The narrator brings up random moments of his life throughout the poem, and I wonder if, when writing this, Kaye simply wrote down memories that came to him as they did. I imagine a man flipping through the pages of his own "life story," but a page cannot be written until after a day is lived. That said, we at nineteen will have fewer chapters that a man of ninety-eight. 

For some reason, I was reminded of the psychological notion of mood-state dependent memory, a theory stating that the memories one can retrieve is relative to the emotional state one is in (example, a person suffering from depression may be quick to reminder darker memories of his life, whilst finding it difficult to remember happier ones). We all have stories, ones with beginnings, middles, and ends, though "not necessarily in that order." If we are to think back on our lives, from where we are now, the memories we retrieve, or the chapters we first turn to, will be dependent on where we are now. 

Kind of an interesting idea, that the story we would tell of ourselves will change throughout our lives, even the first few chapters. Changing the order of the story may change the story itself. I have no idea if that was the point Kaye was trying to make, but that's an idea I pulled.