YOU ALWAYS SAID THAT I’D COME BACK TO YOU AGAIN, EVERYBODY NEEDS A FRIEND, AND I DO

 

Preening

 

Today the grand cedar is a stubborn cuss that won’t buckle in the wind and Lucy’s still gone and I’m alone in this stucco mansion with too many books and windows that make me want to leap and I’m well aware that my privilege is pitiful and my self-pity is too because here in my third-story office the fireplace is like a cat preening and licking itself while they’ve had no heat in half of Ukraine for months and then there’s the earthquake which crushed and killed 46,000 and I’d like to say I’m sorry or do something more than that but I’m a self-fixated white WASP who watches CNN so he can bitch about the world to his other WASPy white friends and while it so often feels like every poem wants me dead all I really want is to be in the company of someone who shakes the truth from my bones or finishes off the job my hackneyed poetry can’t ever seem to do