jailbreak

in search of happier prisons
your name is one out
of twenty-six in a bag

you play falling asleep
hands in the drying air
chapped in heavy summer

epileptic words dropping down
smashing glasslike sheets of
stranger feelings like

i don't know you well enough to say this but
sometimes i understand you better than God does

which words were the last i would speak to you
and which would i have chosen had it been

snowing in the afternoon or blow by blow through
our hair the wind of a last Sunday together

and which would i have whispered still
under that dimming yellow coffee light

if you gave me permission to stay i would
have told your fortune better than God

*

slow rain   down
the walls cave
in falling time

now every piece puddles around you
loves you, loves you

i would tell you only this.