This is
a freshly washed dish
in a drainer

Later today
it will be full
of food and then

will be washed again
The cycle will repeat
until the dish breaks

sometime in the future
when my hand loses its grip
through some illness or injury

I know this because of
how often it has happened
How often something

has been destroyed
because I lost my grip
through injury or illness

or inattention
to detail or how much care
I should have been offering

but I was hungry
Couldn’t wait so I grabbed
for a plate and then

crash
Pieces
Rarely I was cut and I bled

all over the clean dishes
I’d rinse them and
do it again

This is a freshly washed plate
in a drainer and
oh my appetites are

so wild for it that I must consider
that it might be the dirty
afterplate I want most

In the decayed eyes
of the recently dead
sparrow

(who likely hit my window
when I was not home and fell
to the mulch below and lay there
unnoticed until
I went out to replenish
the swift-emptying feeders
tha brought it here)

is everything that is coming:
vision sinking into the bones
that supported it
that will disappear
in their own time and 
feed whatever is next

I felt deep sorrow
and offered my apology
for making it so easy
to indulge hungers that
in the end it led to
your unexpected death

then I
refilled the feeders

in the correction
of faults there is
an opportunity
to diminish the
need to repeat
the behaviors that
led to the faults
but since so often
a fault is just 
the side effect of
an overused strength 
one must take care
not to weaken
what you are at core
in an effort to create
perfection where none
can exist

take for instance
a volcano bleeding
flowing rock and hot ash
doing what it was
made to do 
when it stops for good
the people move in and 
make a life on top of
its scars and skin as if
its seeming extinction
was purposeful and good until
when it shifts 
in its sleep
the people scream as if
betrayed when all that’s happened
is what has always happened

see
when a man falls apart
he may well fall
back into himself then
double down and surge
into the same forms as before
he cracked 

magma is magma
no matter when
it finds its way
blows out
of the cracks

If a dark chocolate
ice cream cone
appears in mid-air
between you and a child 
in danger, you will 
no doubt push the cone aside
as you rush to the child’s
salvation.

If the sobbing child
is comforted when you
turn back to seize the cone
and give it to them,
you will eventually convince yourself
this has all been 
preordained and that you
were indispensable here. 

You will cease questioning
the appearance of the cone
in the crisis moment, assuming
a divine intervention or
alignment of planes
created this, and you
will feel no horror
that a child
may have been endangered
just to help you feel special,
that magic was forced into service
just so you could feel heroic,
and that the anti-gravitational nature
of the final piece of the scenario
was a conjuring that had a meaning
beyond the moment; that you 
were in fact a means to an end and
as much a mere cog 
within the situation
as all the rest
of its elements were.