OK…a larger revision, focusing the poem more sharply, I hope.

DIALOGUE

I tell her, the time between

late winter and early spring
really takes a toll on my
optimism about sweat equity: you survive
the dark months expecting you’ll find relief
in the growing light, and then
nothing changes.

that’s the problem with you, she says. all I
ever hope for is that I’ll
still be breathing
when the wind turns
lukewarm. I respond that

days like this
hurt worse than february’s worst
knife. just as the crocus
starts to crack the frost and pierce through,
you give up on hope and admit to a longing for bloodshed,
drunken fights in dive bars or a sudden burst of deadly lust
that carries you into a strange bed through a broken
window and from there into oblivion; every bad impulse
to self-immolation breaks out in you as if you were
a ruptured pod.

you think it’s wrong to feel that way,
she says. but it’s not wrong to
describe a heart as broken
if it is broken, or a fallen hope as
fallen even if it has yet to hit the
ground.

what you don’t get to do, she says,
is marinate
in the description until
you’re tender.

I don’t fully understand but I think we are
not so far apart. all this bloodlust in me
is just a way of acting the same thing she is saying.

I want to reach for her
and explain this but
there are shadows among my fingers
that leave me cold. there are bones
hidden in my flesh that I’ve never noticed.
I’m afraid the sun
won’t ever break through to warm them.
I’m afraid that
if I try to touch her,
one of us may shatter.