Joshua Corwin

Looking Back, I am Enough

I meander these halls of hopeless entertainment

which life seems to bring me

and remember where I’ve come from.

I was that kid who was picking up trash on the

playground and assembling them into

something else, something to get away from this

place, this planet in which I feel I’ve been ordained

or ordered. I was the kickstand kegstand man in college, 

trying to prove that he was enough. I was that

mathematician hiding in your basement, not coming

out, in fear that he couldn’t do a PhD thesis, 

and that spending long hours working on a 

solution to a theorem and laying out the proof in

advance, would prove to others, that it was OK

to swish that fine glass of wine atop a mental hierarchy

of not enough, plagued by the salvation of this moment,

which haunted after me but yet I wilted away, raced from

campus security, when I was afraid to go to the hospital,

when I was afraid to be alone. I said and sprayed, spit-

ball fireball enrabiado embers burned myself into

urns of truth, under the fallacy of slaving wayside, and

regurgitating lies: spindle-webbed stories from my

unpursued slips, with unpursed lips, which were sown 

shut by isolation, an isle of subsisting an elixir,

which really didn’t last for even a nanosecond 

when I fell, owl-eyed, aching for a glimpse of

Eden; I had realized she was a shadow that I had counted

in transcendental number theory, and tried to prove by

cloaking my own shadow. But upon the death of my grand-

father Mert, and upon the life-bringer palabras of professors, 

I realized that I was enough, and upon that meditation in a 

Shrine in Korea Town, I realized I was enough.

And upon the reading of my Fifth Step with my Sponsor,

I realized I was enough. And upon my reading of my book,

Becoming Vulnerable, I realized I was enough. And upon

the tears of gratitude on which I see myself peering into

the window of hope, I realize I am enough.

I am enough to keep on making mistakes and finding myself

never alone in the shadows.

I am enough to find myself humming a tune called gratitude.

I am enough to remember that it’s OK to forget,

that’s OK to realize the window is sometimes foggy,

and that the image isn’t always of a handsome highway,

but sometimes a muddy mountain man, trekking up the 

abyssal fade found only in heaven, where everything is enough.