I can't take credit for every one of my failures.
The best of my mistakes were not made on my own.
but the poet without a pen is simply on their own.
Love's rough bargain offers the world and more;
all that it requires is everything you think you own.
Sleep thickens in the corners of the lover's room.
Even together, we bear the weight of years on our own.
The long shadow of rain crosses my brother's grave.
There is no Why, it repeats; you are on your own.
When I was a child, I could draw every world imagined;
It was no punishment to be left on my own.
Perhaps we grieve most that which never arrived,
a palpable absence that claims us as its own.
The anxieties of youth are lessened by those of age;
but the worst of our lives is not all that we own.
