to have something to look forward to
because our aspirations,
however small (I want to watch TV later)
are our guides

it often takes more courage to fail
than to succeed

learning to love after you
will be like learning to
fall asleep
in a war zone

I see every
god I ever prayed to

there's something lonesome about you
the way your hair parts
how it splits
indecisive yet so
tumultuous and raging
my lonesome monsoon
made of fraying knots
for strangers to tie and untie
until you come together
or it all falls apart

we were gum toothed kids
popping stones onto trickling tarmac
black and boiling tar

and kissing our nail beds
and biting our tongues
pure puckered flesh and blistering blood

hoarse from our philanthropic noise
antagonists
flashing shouts and rolling loud

my dear lonesome wildfire
with a soul of salt and thunder
eat this youth alive

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a ******
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.