Cecil Morris

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2021

All My Lives

Cecil Morris

This morning I imagine parallel universes running side by side through space and time or maybe twisting around each other like separate fibers braided in rope or overlapping like twine wound tight in gigantic balls or like fresh laundry stacked in folds of possibility or maybe like multitudinous and invisible yet discrete str2ams of data streaking through fiber optic cables. I imagine how my infinitely varied lives might be screaming along simultaneously, each parallel me unaware of the numberless other mes as similar as all the shades of gray, as different as black and white, each blind, each oblivious to the way every single choice cascades consequences, every action or inaction a singularity, its own big bang of multifarious forkings, until, limitless as photons, I travel uncounted roads, all my lives in action at one time, each a secret unknowable by the others. So, spiraling somewhere across the universes, Rhonda met the eighth grade me at the Square for ice cream and liked me enough to meet again and again until we wed and somewhere else I died young when my mother did not yank me from river's rush and throw me on the bank where I flopped and gasped like a stunned fish and somewhere else entirely I am still living the life where my first wife, my true heart, did not lose her life to cancer, where we grow old together and watch our children raise their children.

Cecil Morris lives in California and is retired after 37 years of teaching high school English. He now tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and enjoy. He likes ice Cream too much and cruciferous vegetables too little. He has had a handful of poems published in 2River View, Cobalt Review, English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, and other literary magazines.