Imagining yourself a one true love,
know
these are lunatic lies
arranged in the sky to wile away
the monumental guilt that tessellates stony relationships

You're a young man
starting out- there's
heroism on minor scale
a dreamy-eyed smouldering
some sense of discrete self-evaluation
a modesty of taste

I am some madder
version of who nobody should be
amoral, unkind, with nothing to redeem me
save the love of ragged street-dogs, and the owning of books.

Why fall into togetherness,
as if it were an easy game, to arrange in terms
of size, splendor, jollity, dice?

And that done, why pretend nobody loses?
At least admit to feeling lost.

You're
memory
of a silhouette walking
to me
you're as real as this poem is.