numbers

nobody told you life was worth its weight in numbers. 
it begins with a month, a day, a year
day one of month twelve of year one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-five
your two lungs first afforded you oxygen sometime between breakfast and dinner. 
ten fingers, ten toes
two eyes, one snotty nose. 
no one bothered to count the hairs on your head,
not enough time in the day. 

you probably spoke the First
between year zero and one,
a two-lettetrd rejection, 
too familiar in time.

you unearthed your first friend in
the sea of twenty-four kindergarteners. she was two pigtails
and a periwinkle crayon,
to be broken in various places. 

she was the first of one thousand disappointments. 

you forgot seven teachers by the time you reached
ninth grade. 

your schedule of eight periods
became a day
of seven-hundred steps
backwards.  

you fell in love three times, each
with a flagrance forty times the last.

when you arrived at 
year seventeen,
you had harvested two thousand and eleven 
smiles,
unravelled seven hundred laughs,
written thirty seven essays. 

there were six hundred unanswerable questions
six hundred too many

you wanted to scream every eleven minutes
but uttered no cry.

it had only taken eight minutes for your soul
to finally crawl out of your two-hundred and six bones,
your fifty-pound skin. 

one hundred seventy six tires marched in your funeral procession
forty flowers toppled over 
one casket
ten inches of snow
six feet under. 

seventy dirty tissues,
eleven people still lingering,
thirty pairs of boots. 
no one bothered to count 
the tears.  
not enough time in the day.