I asked what I should do
with the knowledge that bad does not
equal evil—
that good/good weren’t the same thing.
And I was told it was absurd that I
should get lost in the word (absurd).
And there was Sisyphus,
grabbing a drink after his shift, smiling like a god-
damned fool saying, “it’s not so bad,
it’s never so bad.”
I suppose I was content for a while
to see him happy; thinking, “oh you poor
bastard. Oh, you pitiable soul.”
The thought forever creeping like a vine
around my neck, “I’m not him, I’m not
him, I’m not him!
And even if I were, what would I do?”
we supposed that I would smile too.
Bryan Hlavinka is a former poetry contributor to Glass Mountain (Vol. 2 and Vol. 5) returning to the journal after a sixteen-year hiatus. In that interval, his path led him from creative writing classrooms into a career in experiential marketing, and eventually back to the University of Houston as a post-baccalaureate biochemistry student and Chief Scientist at the Curran Nanophysics Lab. He is honored to be included in this collection.
