Inside Us, A Flower Taken Whole, A

By The Time I Make My Way To The Border Of Mauritania, To The Edge Of The Sahara, I See No End To Being Lost. You Can Spend Your Entire Life Simply Falling In That Direction. It Isn't A Station You Reach But Just The General State Of Going Down. Once You Make It Back, If You Make It Back, You Will Stand Before Your Long-lost Friends But In Some Essential Way They Will No Longer Know You.

I Offer Emily Half Of My Hit Of Acid- Love Saves The Day. It's My Second Or Third Time Tripping, Emily's First, And She's Understandably Trepid. Awake All Night, At One Point I Find Her Touching Her Reflection In A Cruelly Lit Dorm Bathroom, Asking If She'll Ever Be The Same. I Kiss Her Then For The First Time And Whisper, No.

The Attention One Gets From Being A Poet Isnt Great.

Sometimes I'd See My Father, Walking Past My Building On His Way To Another Nowhere. I Could Have Given Him A Key, Offered A Piece Of My Floor. A Futon. A Bed. But I Never Did. If I Let Him Inside I Would Become Him, The Line Between Us Would Blur, My Own Slow-motion Car Wreck Would Speed Up. The Slogan On The Side Of A Moving Company Truck Read Together We Are Going Places--modified By A Vandal Or A Disgruntled Employee To Read Together We Are Going Down. If I Went To The Drowning Man The Drowning Man Would Pull Me Under. I Couldn't Be His Life Raft.

Change Is One Of The Only Constants In Buddhism; As Meditation Became The Way I Breathed In The Days, This Became Apparent.