Dancing with Everyone

I wake up in Raffe’s bed

through the dusty morning window

I see a palm

growing sunward

up up out

from the crumpling of bright houses

into cloudy

and blue

it’s the California sky.

up, away

bye Raffe

Charlie

gave me heartwood,

told me to smell it,

I reluctantly held it to my nose — this piece of hum-drum monochromatic kindling

But then, when I clutched it and kept inhaling the fumes from the sap and the wood

she smiled saying, see

and then she got in a clown car

and the clowns

tatooed and hollering

drove away

festival bound

with bright plastic juggling pins

trailing a pot cloud

bye Charlie

I admired the way the swing dancer danced with everyone

Swinging right out of these arms and into those.

Swirling joyfully to never get pinned, never KO’d

with awkwardness, worry, uneasiness, but just kept swinging ‘round on whims

dancing with everyone.

And then I got to be the one. To fall and leap and leave.

But in leaving them I am trying to leave me too.

That’s the part I didn’t see, in that swing dancer.

“Just because you don’t want to be with yourself doesn’t mean I don’t want to be with you!” Rob shouted at me as we huddled beneath a broken umbrella bracing ourselves against the rain and wind, having invented some reason to speed-walk down the abandoned tracks in the wind and rain shouting beneath a broken umbrella. young. in Indiana.

Bye Rob.