”You're kind in the ways you wish to be kind

and each day is as much the same as you

wish it were different. Lavish your limits."

she said, "Embrace me customarily

but be a little longer letting go."

"You naked ghost, tie me down and somehow

die again," I pleaded, "leave me screaming,

'I'm better now!'"

                          "Better like a better

person? Or like you're no longer ill?"

she asked. "You will go to actual jail.

Now, didn't it feel odd, to put your mouth

against someone else's for the first time?

Cloud-print sheets and yawning purple shadows,
as familiar as wetting the bed."

Do you speak of change the hardest? Charge the

open heart when guarded? One’s advice so

hard to follow when so dearly, dearly

needed. Big change talking, short walk taking:

on the subway, sidewalk, bike-path; judging,

judging, judging, judging. Foreheads joined in

opposition, playing kissing games like
children craft apologies begrudging.   

Frigid hands, forbidden parties, process

of illumination: Krishnamurti

understood; love it first, then understand.

It hit me like a sucker punch: cork your

bleeding nose with cotton; this is New York.

Fruit, ripen, strive to spoil, void and rotten.

"Protest's over, protesters arrested."

"You don't know the half of it, brother; hide,

your cell is waiting for you contested.

From jump-kick to toothache, rainwater lies

bleeding that would bead on polished headstone,

marked unmarked grave. Details weather cleansed, maze

whose entrance is the exit in disguise.”

"While my plot extrudes its wet bones, the guard

has issued warnings that I shouldn't ride, 

mornings, my bicycle through the graveyard."

It's not that it ended, but how: for days

rage of hard wings from the laundry basket.

I hoped it would go away on its own,

the corpse come to agree with the casket.

Hear conch shell whisper: Her empty bottle

tolls, cast on eve’s splayed breakers; rattles gulls

and recedes walking backwards. Nonetheless

her distress message wades on shattered glass,

to beach collapses dumbstruck, messed, and

feigns shortness of breath. Sawn, her hydrangea

slump by dawn, as the white ghost of thumb pressed

into pink elbow a second ago

shares what it doesn't feel but did. She’ll know,

most likely; bid that necessity dulls

when holding an old lady’s too soft hand

on rough sand, reviving a swamped stranger,               

   or when the next best thing to beach access

   is a compulsory crosswalk puddle.