Cut me off
because I’m stupidly
long winded at times,
oversensitive, fat with a sense
of my own importance
and centered on the inner eye
of my personal storm.

Cut me off
because I’ve stopped caring
about how much I sound
like parents, like teachers,
like the people I hate to admit
live within.

Cut me off
even if I bleed because
that flow would be
the cleanest thing
to come out of me
in years.

Cut me off
and see what buds
from the scar if I heal.
It may be smaller but stronger.
It may be all the incentive
the healthy core of me needs
to get out there
into the sun
and live.

Let us all have one moment
of clarity for our pasts —
not the catastrophic moments,
not the Big Events, not the tragic
or comic or blissful climaxes
we usually hold close and call
“the past,”

but for the startling moments
when we see a person
in a new light, someone
we’d forgotten who comes back
and opens up school lockers
full of surprising good.

Let us praise unfamous people,
words that should have been recalled, statements
that should have been murmured
and branded and engraved
somewhere inside.

Let us open up.
Let us seize scraps
and set them in lockets.
Let us speak to the small
and the ordinary.

Let us learn that
pain and joy are not our province
alone.  Let us learn
that those we forgot
might have been allies
in the old battle of awkward
had we let them in back then,

and let us not keep them out
a moment longer
once they reenter the room.

Phone calls
from dear friends
buzz through
the line I’ve drawn
around time meant
to be alone, very alone
with the critical work.
Like bees
stinging through denim,
they itch me all over
though I know they’re only
reaching out to me
and reacting badly
when I swat them off.

I may never taste honey again,
but at least I’m completing
important things. So many,
many important things
I can’t remember them,

and there’s no one besides me
who knows of them all.