Cokes For Lack Of Better Cake

You don’t know it
but you sounded off your birthday
of two decades and two years
with a Coke can popping in the light
of our refrigerator door

and that made me love you more.
And think of the holes in your eyes
where the world seeps through
and translates to your brain
what makes a person a person--
what makes a person good.

It made me fold into your chest,
crumpled as the receipts on the sticky
floorboards of your car

it made me think of eyelids and sleeping
and noises we’ll never know we make

it made me love you.

So I thought of birthdays
the anniversary of the days not spent dying
the astonishment we’ve felt as a civilization for centuries
that we could inhabit the earth for so long

and so I thought of you
tiny, crumpled like me in your chest
dreaming, dying, and I wonder
what woke you up

a sound so quick, as a Coke can pop,
“Not yet.”

What kept you coming back, to have another
today? What can make a person good
except living?