Don’t worry —
I can do it again,
this magic trick
of the mind.

It’s not like
there’s a daily limit
or

a penalty for having
paused. I can do it
again, another bead
on the string,

and another.
Every day,
my string

is cut; all my
beads tumble
back into
the box

where I keep them.
Every day, the same
box with different

beads — slightly
different — and
every day, I race
to string them

before time runs out.
That’s what I’d like
you to think, but

the truth is,
there are days
when I don’t
look inside.

A large cockatoo roams inside my head,
saying words that only I understand.
I believe it has chosen me
for some type of mission,
but its larger plan is, as yet,
unknowable, unknown
as its canny, nictitating eye.
I feel its clawed, leathery toes
grasping my medulla oblongata.
It tells me, repeatedly, rasping,
that it is as smart as
a two-year-old human child.
Well, so am I. So am I.

But I do appreciate that you tried,
and I’ll show you to your car.
You can ride off into the night
with a tale you can only tell
yourself: something about
how you looked in my mirror,
how we ate the papers, too,
not just the cupcakes of life,
and you always hated my dog, or
I never had a dog, but I did
once make you a cicada sandwich
because you said you wanted
to try something new.

I am the same as an elegant bluebird.
I wear pink houndstooth all the time.
Pass me a mint, Freddie — I have

some people to kiss,
and none of them
are you.

I love
these burnt ends of earth
where you live
and where the ground
is dust
your hair is dust
your eyelashes
carrying dust
wherever you go
it falls everywhere
and everywhere it falls
new fires begin

I’ll be jiggered if she didn’t figure
it out — which way the creek runs
when it’s almost high and dry.
The bones inside stones, how to shape
birds out of clay, breathe on them
to make them live. She’s like
some kind of god, or a lesser pot
to put our God thoughts in.
She has flaming eyes, even though
her fever broke two weeks ago.
We don’t know whether to kill her,
run her out of town, or keep her
as one of our own. But we’re
bound to do one of those things,
and we said we’d choose tonight.

Alone, I invest these rocks with significance,
as if they carry stories from some
forgotten earth.

Alone, I set these stones in circles
around divots in the sidewalk or
cracks along the driveway.

Alone, these pebbles begin to sing
in voices we can’t hear yet —
a melody we recall, words we don’t know.

Release the idea that everyone
has to be your friend,
or even that
everything that can be repaired
should be repaired.
Accept jaggedness
and broken places —
stich them together
with contrasting thread
or leave them unstitched.
Let uneasiness linger,
or silence.
Put down your phone.
Look at me.

My true north looks like a bird of paradise
or — what’s it called? That flower that
looks like it has a penis standing
right up out of the center? Caladium?
No? Anyway, that’s what it looks like:
Some kind of flower that’s also a bird
that’s also some dude’s genitals. I know.
If I could choose again, I totally would,
but I didn’t choose it the first time,
and I think that once these things
are set, there’s no going back.
It’s like trying to change your
name, or some detail about
your life, your history,
when you’re in college.
You’ll answer to it and
claim it as yours, but
it won’t ever ring true.
Not really. True north is
like that, too, so I’ll be
guided by embarrassing plants
with flagrant, panting tongues
forever, will seek them even in
the dead of winter, in greenhouses
and hothouses wherever I go. Even now,
I build for them a jungle in my mind.

Packing up your truck with
Spongebob ice cream bars
and bomb pops until
there was hardly any room
for you, and no room for me.
You said it was summer
somewhere else now, and you
had to go where the weather
sent you. What are you,
a winged seed caught in
a perpetual breeze?
You told me caught is
what you were when you were
here with me. That was May
through September. Now
it’s November, and I wish
I could catch you again.