Time to go, she says,
Time to leave this place.
You’ve ruined every chance.
You’ve wasted every day.

What you didn’t know, she adds,
Or, what you didn’t realize,
Was this simple, solid fact:

Your one and only purpose
In this small and stupid life
Is to love
Until your time is spent
And that, she says,
Is that.

Words are a floating anchor that bumps the ocean floor

And goes more and more against the World’s winds and waves and winds and waves.

Upon the floating anchor, a rusting girl

Who knows not whence she came
Or how she came to be
Upon the floating anchor
At the bottom of the sea.

Those floral paper walls

Are a bored woman’s mind

And it lines the earth she looks out upon with a drying mouth and twitching eye

“These flowers are not mine.”

My sweaters are no match:
When I pull them tight
Against my chest,
They do not stifle
My Great Unrest.

And when it starts- the clanging ring,
I crawl into the space between
My 40-year-old daydreams
And a yellow shelf
Which, when nailed,
Propped a Bunny
That couldn't prop itself.

And yet,

At least it had the courage to say:
I NEED HELP!

I am scared often.
I am sad always.
I am lonely in darkness.
I am lonely in light.
But most of all:
I am out of sight.

These feelings are not new feelings
but I've never felt them before.

I've grappled with
and been concerned

with all things other

than that of love
and how it is born.

She pressed her hand
against the glass of the tank
to let him know her fingerprints,
to let him be her friend.

He stuck awhile, being brave -
told his friends he wouldn't leave.
and he stayed
and he stayed

although he was afraid.


The stranger that he's seen but never known
Just walking past him like a ghost.

And everyday,
and everyday,

they see but never say.

It comes to when she kneels
And rests upon her heels

to tell the fish of blue and spirit,
"I have an angel
and you are it."