will asking all those skinny naked pity questions
help to heal you because yes I am loving the city you
abandoned for a steely-eyed number-crunching New Yorker
to let you sleep tenderly smothered beneath his

wing but never to fly, never left to wander, to uncover the
ecstasy of madness, fruitlessness,

uselessness and the love to be won from the
self-destruction we had but instead traded for the
exhilaration of straitjackets and anchor pills as if
daring to feel the full stab of the lover’s moon and grit our

teeth and clean the wound and survive somehow makes us strong
or good for rejecting the death or that

blood and love inside and out is what defines us or that
either one of them could make us feel like we’re free

...or even what we used to be