I’m tense around you

I’m tense when (you) are not around me

I feel tension

And the need to release

Time elapses

Time is spent

I am spent, and time continues

Is time linear, or do we experience linear time,

And if many lines can draw a picture and a picture can transport us somewhere outside of

ourselves, our reality, can just a few lines do the same?

There is intimacy with a partner

And there is intimacy with the universe

When you’re sitting alone on a park bench and a bird lands just before your feet and you could

swear it’s looking right at you and in fact, it is looking at you, and if you told the bird your name

would it remember or would you only tell yourself it will?

And if someone collects the seeds from the bellies of birds that flew into clean windows and

died, and then planted those seeds in the ground to complete the process that the bird began, is

that not a form of communion with the world in which we exist?

Isn’t there a profound intimacy in the gesture of attempting to right a wrong?

Isn’t there profound intimacy in telling you something that I did wrong?

There are moments that feel as though I am staring into the eyes of universal history,

And moments when I feel completely, and utterly alone

I am trying very hard to reconcile the two.

And I am trying to reconcile what is between us,

What was between (us)

There are weights that pull

And weights that ground

And waits that feel heavy in your eyes, in your back, and hips, and knees

And sometimes it is best to just lie down

Or give in

Or to give up

But I still hang on

I find peace in the labor of building, of ordering the disorder, and tearing it down once it has

been perfected

The studs remain:

Line, tension, repetition, intersection, weight, me, you.