“It’s Not Your Fault” by Jon Sands
It’s Not Your Fault
It’s not your fault, you were just looking at your phone
while peeing, who cares, you were just banking,
you were just standing in line at the bank. It’s just
a train ride, it’s just one thing your three-year-old
had to repeat twice but then you heard it,
and now you just have to check one thing, it’s myself.
I just got some new followers, so I just need to see
how many that’s at now, it’s just a wedding
ceremony with no phones followed by a reception
where we consider what lighting best frames the present,
it’s just priorities, just a few stories, I’m just checking
my email again, it’s just a small infatuation that means
less than a little, half an article on the Knicks’
3-point shooting, a quarter of today’s headlines.
I was literally just trying to look at my calendar
which I never even opened! It’s just half an hour,
it’s just a marriage, just a week’s worth of sex, it’s just
easier to move my thumb along the screen protector
like it’s tender, it’s just grief after grief after
your kid at a baseball game after grief after gif
after grief, it’s just a tweet my wife and I can laugh
about. It’s just all books for God’s sake, the capacity
to read one for instance, and if everyone’s an addict
then it’s just fucking Wednesday morning before you
even fucking piss, it’s just a fucking brain rearranged,
it’s just a fucking gun aimed at a car you don’t recognize
at an hour you don’t socialize, it’s just a little
loneliness, a meditation app, and I get to see
how many minutes I’ve meditated in my whole life
but only the minutes that made someone else money,
it’s only making invisible people money, it’s only
my personality, only a synapse, only a kindergarten
graduation, it’s only an eighth of my one waking life,
some people give away more than that, what’d you say?
it’s just my alarm clock, my atlas, my calendar,
my compass, it’s just cigarettes in the seventies, baby,
just paying the fucking piper, trying to cry
but all that comes out is a theme song, just the video
of Ed Sheeran on a car on a guitar in Manhattan
in a sea of phones. It’s just Frank standing on one foot,
his arms outstretched making his baby brother
open with laughter, the sunlight of him breaking
through the clouds while I reach for my pocket
to view it through a new lens but the second
I push record they stop.
Jon Sands is a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, selected for his second book, It’s Not Magic (Beacon Press, 2019). He is the facilitator of the Emotional Historians workshop, a series of generative writing classes you can find out more about on IG at @iAmJonSands. His work has been featured in The New York Times, published in The Rumpus, The Millions, Cortland Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Muzzle, and many others. He is a curator for SupaDupaFresh, a monthly reading series in Brooklyn, and has received residencies and fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation, and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
