I think of you when I am drunk.
When my synapses and veins are giving up every bit of their chemical snap, I think of you.
Whoever you may be, you've already drawn so many things from me that it's a shame we've never met.
It'll take a poem to tell you that, so maybe a poem isn't so different from a prayer.
I think of you when I'm sitting in my shirt-sleeves blowing smoke and all alone. All it takes is one good poem to make me feel like nothing's gone amiss, so when I go out on a limb I don't feel it shake because I know I can get used to this. I watch my smoke billow off into the sky and I know my words will take me there, to wherever it is you are, so maybe a poem isn't so different from a prayer.
When I close my eyes and squeeze my hope out into the night air I see signs that swivel backward and forward along magnificent and shifting lines.
What's written in the leaf and the brick, the brilliant smiling faces, is the language of the divine, calling back at me in the voice of whatever god has made me. It only knows one lovely language, and it's be talking lately about how the cicada shrills in summer, or just how that same smell sticks to the rain age after age.
So when I open up my Facebook page and it tells me there are new stories I know just how true that is.
That in all of this business, whatever it may be about, there might be out there somewhere a final chance, but you haven't reached it yet, so keep shooting.
Maybe a poem is not so different from a prayer.