please forgive
every wasted minute of my life
wasted wishing I had not wasted them

please forget
all the fears you couldn’t face
fearing facing them would not erase

your father’s face in a half sigh
half frown
looking down
wishing you could make him not
ever wish, like your sisters,
you’d keep a marriage down
or, like your brothers,
make a child right

but // I say
forget the face
and forgive every spec of wasted space
between you and your beginning
you’ll see more by the end and
I hope when you’re in them
you’ll notice there is no such thing as space
that is wasted
when you’re in it

how did it end?
insects at night
in my mind
chirp the endless thought
how did it end?
really end?
it felt so close to lasting forever
just one failed moment after another
it accumulates, they say,
but it doesn’t feel that way in the middle of it
you just think
if we get through this
through this one
then forever on
we will maintain

if i could have just guessed the right words
her soul wished so to hear
words she could not tell me
words she needed me to know
without her ever saying so

then after that
maybe I…
I’d never have to again

maybe then
I could be loved without condition
maybe if I…
if I…
‘if I’ must be indicative of some special misery
like bats in a cave
‘if I’ bounces around my brain, together and alone
the same

i never learned i could have been enough for someone
without even trying
i never knew i was allowed
to call me beautiful
before now

my only remaining goal in life is to leave
many meaningful things behind

so that in the way seeing a lost loved one’s
formerly cherished things
confronts us with meaning
—
the glass chess pieces
this particular bass guitar
the yarny blue cardigan
—
my number of cherished things will increase
so that upon my leaving
they will all bleed meaning

and
ideally (if it is available to me)
the things I love will keep increasing
until including the entire world

so that then, when I leave,
you will still have the entire world
saturated with me

the way it would occur to me
is “what would GOD think?”
“what does HE think?”
but what i meant was
“what would you think?”
“what would they think?”
if they knew
knew that i did not know
what they meant by it
when they say we are all sinners
when they say deep down
they hate each other
i have never hated anyone
until you told me the word to use
for when I am dancing
and interrupted
for the feeling that comes up
when someone is disgusting
on purpose
to me

i wish i never learned it
they
like everyone
behave out from it
from their own basic
primal
primitive
perfectly human needs

i wish you would have known
to teach me that instead
to see every action
as mere expression
of some underlying
unconscious
motivation
to serve life
in them
even when the strategies they use
show up in the most offensive ways
unproductive
unimaginative ways
missing out on us
on me
missing out on making life as wonderful
as it could be

“imagine” does not get at
as concretely
what is needed

believing does not
happen
if we are
mere imagining

believing
is what we need

so say it convincingly
and concretely

and in a thousand years of this

we will bind it all together
we shall call it a bible

GOD forbid someone would ever
force it all
down the throat of GOD

and thus reverse exactly
who is writing about what.

I get the feeling that I am
what one might call
a seasonal friend
or
allergy

I have never met anyone
who had space for “all” of me
in perpetuity

or even “most”
OR EVEN “some”
I would settle for
as
long
as

they don’t
leave