gratitude adjustment in poetry

thirty-something years old although
running on a sixth-sense of feeling
on some fourth or fifth lifetime
on the seventh or eighth timeline
fourteenth fifteenth chance to try
that’s because I’ve known privilege
there’s no reason to ever deny
you get to recycle yourself easily
when you’re somewhat bright and classified white
male and straight and not itching for bar fights
when family takes you back if day turns to night
gotten to be so many different kinds of men
without ending up in jail or homeless or dead
like most people in the world would’ve been
honours class clown and shattered neurotic
Hollywood gopher Brooklyn art-bum
broke-but-not-broken agnostic
prophet-poet-joker at the Rust Belt’s last gleaming
rich folks college or the edge of a protest
cash-empty but filling up on meaning
published or red-carpet premiere
riding waves off the Santa Monica Pier
or washing up back here
handshaking senators or fetching soda for Batman
shaking-hand nervous breakdowns in my childhood bed
damned near every good and bad thing except dead
somehow here I am again
there but for the grace
of the underground and outer space
but for the understanding of family and friends
I wouldn’t be able to be reborn as I do
I have the privilege to be here again
and I want to thank you

all this is an incredible gift most do not have
all of this love luck and leniancy
to be able to dance all over life uncommon’s
standands of deviancy
then still rising up in psychic necromancy
running with puppets buskers bombshell burlesquers
working one’s ass off in mansion and skid-row clinic
then always recovering back at the beginning
sometimes shit but roses at best
sometimes regenerate sometimes reinvent
when so many others will never know rest
there is no word I can use for it
other than “blessed”
not in the mystic or magical sense
but blessed nonetheless
and I want to thank you
for the rare chance to be all this different stuff
but I also know
thanks is not nearly enough

all this experience all of these lifelines
all this forgiveness and slack
one of these days
I will find a way
to fully give back
I still don’t know how
I could ever return such a momentous buy-in
but I’m gonna give back
or I’m gonna die tryin’
I’m gonna give back
or I’m gonna die tryin’

and then I dunno, hell
maybe after I’ll get
to be someone else