Listen, my best wishes for you
are built from the inside out,
like a sentence after the eye falls
upon a reasonable stone and opens
a window I remembered
to save the glass,
to feel December’s bearable embrace.
At the cemetery edge, the shade
of a neighboring house passes
the afternoon in a hooky from the bore.
I am that afternoon,
swiping your parka in a checkout lane
where your granite face gives rise
to fresh gray hair; buy a candy bar
on special. Free sleep mask
with each bouquet.
Out of mounded sprockets
grows a castle into which the dreamer
reaches, sussing out a guillotine.
You are my sunshine, my pillory.
Come rack imagination
in the black well of a boot.
The dead have all lined up,
are never late. Throw your cue
into the low-slung lamp’s
kinetic dark — that it may break.