today I praise
accuracy of caring
as poetry
not
it's ugly cousin
anxiety

the whole
which I adore
confusing into data
that can only hint

friend, I am so far
from creature
that I starve to starve
like strays
stray to stray
or dancers

the troubled work
of actually loving
is another
name for poetry
I adore

to see clearly, to be gentle with illusions
the body, not the brain, convenes
to force fluids
where they are needed
and this is so precise
as to flit past
honesty as category,
honesty as method

loss of the conflictedness
before the devotion to be lost
and free
oh, and all
is what
I simply can't know
or even repair

and because love's glass
ceiling
backs to sky
the weather out there
adds to the weather
in here
and the thin line
is all that holds
us where we need
to be held

that is
in the "this is"
and that trembling
is not intense
it is the word
for the thing
that begs and bends
grace
from its garrulous silence

a duet alive to voice's
rarest
wilderness
when it is good
an opague play of
transparencies
when it is not so

and rhetorical optimism
is the opposite of thinking
"he bit into the lemon,
he bit deep into the lemon's flesh,
he squeezed the lemon
into his mouth,
drop by drop"

you see, the body knows
how to dance
along the mind's
generative magic
and mistletoes collaboration
devoted to convergence
as inherently the opposite
of the ecstasy of realism,
which is also
the sport of both
small-time anxieties
and decorated slowness

but how much of this
is sensation's love of self,
or aestheticism calling itself
mysticism
or proposed soulfulness
or what most call
god

happily
addition of
learned
lost mind
is also a detriment
to imperfect concern
for poem, wife, or husband,

as you say I say