The Loveless Comparison

A little east mostly, brief warmth after yesterday's snow which lingered a few hours on crepuscular leaves still decorating the lawn. Who catalogs reality necessarily goes without it. Goes beside it? Falling asleep I scratched the dog who sidled close, her bones both felt and visible. One accepts with sorrow yet another mortal reminder. You can be pretty damn broken and life will still not accommodate your plans. At three a.m. one sees in the moon a loveliness that is wholly projected, and so is not seeing the moon at all. What then? Chrisoula comes in to ask after me, typing in the back room, writing the little poems I discovered when we met, drinking coffee from a Mason jar. I chew the nights with an intensity most people call dangerous but it's what I know. There are other maps and other ways but you walk the path you was given, no? Stole in a moment of creation? Or perhaps just covet, the way I once made love to strangers whose shoulders moved just so. Even now - letterless and lost, prone to the loveless comparison - I keep writing as if.