Five

i keep hope like a raw thing,
something half-formed under my palm, still warm,
shaped by fingers that don’t yet know what to ask of it.

years are poor carpenters; they promise structure and leave only sawdust in the corners.
they pass with the polite cruelty of a cashier counting change.

the raw is malleable:
it wants to be vessel and altar,
it wants to hold songs and salted light. instead we make devices:
phones that remember us better than we remember ourselves,
plastic cards that click our names into other people’s ledgers,
machines that take a vote and spit out doubt. everything is hackable.

there are emotions that live like eggs in a drawer,
ready to crack into a scatter of glass and small glittering regret.
ants arrive slowly, precise, picking crumbs into neat economies.
i watch them with the same detached awe i reserve for mornings.

keeping hope is work.
 not the romantic kind,
but the kind that industriously refuses decline:
a daily lifting of a light, a practiced stubbornness.
it’s easier to recline into acceptance, to become an auditorium seat
for cable news and reality shows, to let the world narrate itself.

do not call these wishes hope.
desires are small fires, they’re immediate;
hope is a stubborn city lit from the inside, rarer now and endangered.
i write this from the fluorescent belly of retail food service establishment.
my hands emptied by demands that are mostly polite theft.
routine has taught me how to move and not arrive.

like nick carraway i peer at the other party through glass:
the music muffled, the laughter a foreign currency.
i was there once — or i remember being there —
but the fruits now sit in bowls and have gone soft and sour.

we chant united we stand like a tired hymn. we fall —
and fall — and fall.
i stand aside, an onlooker with a cup of lukewarm coffee,
accepting the geometry of my allotment: small squares, small hours.
and still the raw sits under my palm, stubborn, wanting me to do less watching
and more of the slow, slow work of making something that lasts.