You know
When I tell you
Calm your
Head
I’m not telling you to
Let go
I’m telling you to not grip
So tight
To stop clawing
So hard
You have life’s thread
Under your nails
Along with centuries of dirt
Blood from the Great
Wars
And you sit
Thinking
You are alone

When you wake up
Soon
And realize the things
I told you about the
Past
And you send me a post card
With a modest, honest
Un-artistic picture of a
Snow bird
Signed sincerely
With love

You know I will write you
A small letter
And I will fill it
With some kind of
Stuffy intellectualism
Something that starts
Slowly like
As
Heidegger said or
Derrida shows us about writing
Or
Emerson told us we don’t miss out because of this and this
or
Even worse
It was Nietzsche
Who told us
About how to treat criminals
And you will grip
And claw
And chew
Those words
In your cage of a home
And staring through
The bars
You will know
That
All that
Heavy literature
And all this talk about
Freedom
Time
And killing
Can be known so simply
In a wink
Or the flash of
An eye.
That’s why we are criminals.