“hey, asshole —
don’t your feet hurt
from standing on that edge
for so long?”

although she thinks
she could have stopped him,
she lets him fall.

some people think it’s romantic
to love a suicide.
she knows better:
it’s hard work to watch one die,
and harder work
to watch one live.

at the funeral,
she plays harmonica
by the graveside
and horrifies the mourners.

she is no messiah.
she cannot raise anyone.

later,
when the crowd has gone,
she becomes so starved
that she eats dirt from the grave
and wipes her mouth
with flowers.

a man who believes he is in love
wakes up on the yellow line of a country highway.

he crawls to the side of the road just in time to avoid
a huge truck rolling past. he thinks that he might have died
if he had not been so fortunate as to awaken at that moment.

then he thinks that the truck was not that close to the center line
and he might not have died after all.

he crawls back into the road.

he lies there all afternoon while the traffic blows past him
as if he wasn’t there.

he leaves the road at dusk and tells himself
that it was possible that he was never there at all,
ever, at any time.

he decides that
if one feels no pain,
one has not been in love. perhaps if one can lie
on the yellow line and never be struck,
the road one was on was too safe. perhaps
one should stay out there as long as it takes
to be crushed by love, just to understand
that it is not a safe place to be.