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Is this the happiest you’ve ever been?

like a whale I have spent most of my life holding my breath

snow slipping off the car

like a soft belly hanging over the waistband of a pair of jeans

or pearls of colloidal oatmeal on my fingers

us solemn rednecks with crooked smiles

horses with phone numbers

sharpied on their flanks

let loose and running from the flames

no one feels the same as anyone else but sometimes

driving around at night

watching a hundred different lit up doorways to a hundred different lives

you lean over to kiss me at a stoplight while Don Williams sings

I wouldn’t want to live if you didn’t love me

it’s here I think this shelter taken in the roof

of someone else’s mouth

breathing the deep exhaust of the night

dying isn’t only something that happens to other people

I remember waiting tables during brunch

it was snowing and a man was having a heart attack

we pretended it wasn’t happening while he was crying

and vomiting all over himself like a giant old child

and his wife held him until the paramedics arrived

I don’t know what happened to him

it doesn’t matter

I wish I could love you the way you want me to

smoothly without trying

it’s been one of those days or months or series of years

I whack open an apple exposing

a plush white worm now in two pieces and suddenly there it is:

the apple, the worm, the knife and I can’t tell which one I am

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