Thinking hard during
a night drive north
on an empty road,
the dark rolled tight around me
like a cigar wrapper.

This evening
a young girl with a strange name
asked me why so many of my poems
seem to include some reference
to being apart from my body,
inhabiting it as a foreign entity.

I know it’s true —
I am a passing voice.
Every moment a container,
a long tube awaiting flame.
I’m the filler made
to go up in smoke.

When she asked me if
I ever feel whole

I could feel the weight she was ready to hang
on the answer…

and said yes,
there are moments. 

And then I stopped,
unable or too shy
to explain.

We looked at each other.
She shook my hand and left…
and what I should have said
came to me on the road, here, now,
hot with the urgency of needing to get home
to my bed, to her…
should have said:

Don’t worry. 
It will happen,
It will be better.
Someone will set you on fire,
or you will find your own source
of spark,
and you will understand unity
as a curl of white in the air
that scents everything, that makes you
and the air and the breath and the fire
one.