Cycles

Cycles

Early June after rainstorm. First peeling off
your jacket and shedding it like a flowerhead,

you rest your palms on the windowpane.
You don't like feeling so intact, feeling

your pulse check your collarbone. You heat
up a bowl of oats, sip coffee that's mostly

vanilla cream. Where you haven't been
your author in years. And now the body

is a bluebell on fire. Broken elegies melt
on the tongue like aloe, calls of change

spray across locked doors, you join yourself
inside every evening and its loss. This is how

you remember it: how you are always coming
back. Where now all that's left free is you

and your encyclopedia of therapeutic treatments.
And won't someone please dream of

the unsustainable. Won't someone stay
to watch the world bleed you out

like a lily with its stem cut, dripping.