My neighbor’s dog needed love so much
one day it tried to get free of it’s runner,
went after a baby,
and ended up pulling back off it like a whip,
spraining it’s own neck,
the totally oblivious and giggling baby
retrieved from the lawn by the angry parent,
who kicked the Jasper colored dog in the stomach
and told it, it was a bad boy.
I taught a disabled, middle-aged man
how to change the filters in his respirator,
how to go to the bathroom in the toilet
instead of on it,
and how to spray whitewash on shelves,
whatever the undulating self in my sealed up heart
couldn’t let the rest of world know
I was saving myself for.
I didn’t want to have to get to know anybody,
I was hiding,
wanting to believe the raw truths about my life
could be shed
and made to look like a dream again,
squeaking
through that stuff that gets pushed
to the side of the road
and forgotten,
crawling, chewing
myself underneath the next impossibly heavy
and practically microscopic pebble,
to build a home.