Poem
I’m home today for the first time in years. Nothing’s changed
and everyone’s asleep.
Even the most ambitious peaks seek only to refold into earth,
to curve around their tips and gap the sky like scansion,
the segments of an orange bending out and
forming a peel in all the right places before meeting again
at the soft white spot in the middle.
A photograph of prayer flags shows off rectangular panels in red, green, cyan,
strung up over the ridges of the Himalayas like dirty laundry.
I wish a pair of tube socks could be holy.
Like an outstanding hose in the arms of a tender lover,
feet divert from the vertical gust of our other limbs,
then spray into a particulate blush.
Despite all that rebellion, our bodies are better and more mobile for it.
Still, I wonder if it’s possible to say a thing and mean it,
or if the only solution is to create simply for the purpose of decay
in hopes that over time
we can erode at the growths around our mouths.
