say this to everyone

We were young and now we are not young.

20 years of this, since our one strange date on the 24 Divisadero bus.

Back then I didn’t understand why we were on it, why we didn’t

go somewhere else, but it seems to me now, we have,

forever,

afraid of what would happen when we were

alone, even when we were alone. Even when we

were afraid. Even when it seemed like spending

our lives with someone we knew we couldn’t

spend our lives with, that had to be preferable

to being with it, whatever it was. And now we are not with those

people, and yet it seems to me this

will outlive us, this thing we have carried all this way, and

that it is made of something more durable than

the hearts which are it’s parents,

will climb free of us after our deaths,

and go on to live free of the turmoil in which we spent our lives.

At last, each will say. Now we can be together.

We struggle still, to keep it from being known and

also to keep it.

I love you, you say sometimes. Or you say, Hello, love. Or,

you say some other endearment, and you act as if you say

this to everyone, and perhaps you do, so that when you do

mean it you can say it, and I get to

both know and don’t know. And perhaps we are so

dangerous to it, that together we could destroy it,

that it would die if it were somehow to be ours together. But

perhaps not.

For now, this is how I do it, here,

in this poem you might or might not read, that you might or

might not know is for you. This is where I say, I love you. I say,

Hello, love. I say, If what we feel for each other has lasted

this long and through all the time we have starved it,

can it not last the other way?