It's not anyone's fault that this world is full of omens.By all accounts, history is a practiceof ignoring things & hoping for the best. You can driveyourself crazy with looking. You can expectbad luck to mark you unfooled, fooled.Light to mark you with light.

On Broad Street, ravenslurk on the Divine Lorraine Hotel as if to sayAlways a corpse flower, never a bride.

If I loved someone like that. A figure of questionable authorityfiguring out which relics to preserve under cling wrap.For the way he smelled like cedar. Mispronounced the names of plants.

My mind is a wishbone drying. I hold it taut & pull to break.

Listen to me, I'm not hiding it—I'm swimming out to meet the boatscoming armed up the river& I wish he were watchingthrough a lead-black fog.I had his book of exits learned by heart.I thought I knew it.

We're almost a whole shadow now from far away.

but I can stand here reciting all the words I haveover the hole & that's what's left—

New inadequate gestures of suffering Chimeric thing

How many implements of shame should I hold againstmyself?