Poem

When I open myself up again to being touched,
I want to write poems again, and only then.
They never show up for me in the cool, closed spaces
of rest, or hiking alone up a mountain day after day.

Perhaps there is something that links poetry and touch,
skin on skin, two people breathing in and out of
each other, that feral and unfocused grasping. The strange
weight of some new arrangement of bone and flesh
pressing itself against your own frame, also suddenly
unknown to you. Something in it like words,
slippery, unfamiliar.

But no songbird or sunrise in either, no mention
now of loving anyone. Just hands and faces pushing,
pushing against the dark.