Why tonight?
Of all nights, knitted carefully by the slenderest of hands,
To form into a year, that springs into decades and centuries
And into a future with both of us gone –
Of all nights, that I have lain awake, asleep, disturbed, in love –
Why tonight?
Of all nights, why this night – when the moon shows nothing but its fullness
And bareness and disguise?
Why tonight?
Of all people, completing the billionth count, filling the shards of this planet we pity to call continents –
Why you?
In a pinch of the slenderest fingers
like tapioca beads to the wind
the mercury fog is popped.
Wild silver happenstance rains down
and settles quiet. Quiet.
Had my pale head touched the earth
at the moment of it's impact
I would have drowned in the mist.
With slender fingers turned to roots,
hair to moss, blood to sap,
a papier-mache skin to the earth's skeleton
To be popped, by the tenderest finger's of soil embrace
drawn to the sky like tapioca beads to the wind.