Holding Hunger

In the evening 

the day's accumulated heat

literally drips from your fingers. 

It's a bit like a nutrient, 

the vapour plants issue. 

But you sit in a room 

beneath quilts with 

the windows shut. To 

diminish horizontally the 

longer breath is sucked 

from one's body is to understand 

what land experiences the second 

the sun plunges. 

I cradle such absence, your lightness 

so palpable as to become a kind of pressure. 

It's dense yet evasive with the air I draw in.

A coronation is presented by shadows,

your presence compassion enthrones, staring staring 

with the private resolve of 

an anorexic.

Your hands are narrow as blanched sugar cane. 

They contain the knowledge of letting go, 

offering themselves absolute as night.

Though slight, such sustenance

is too good and too much.

The Essential

Deprivation increases intention.

Note the cornered animal snarling, leery of everything

except a cave beneath cracks.

Some fair better, make disillusionment an oasis,

place paintings, morning glories, over shrapnel-pocked walls.

Both have dignity, laced with desperation, self-preservation

distorted to tolerance or eccentricity—–

the horse and its blinders desiring to protect,

envision only one thing:

a dream, that luxury, to either rage against, accept,

or slowly go beyond imposed limitations.

Would it drive the beast mad if salvation came fast?