No metaphors for

Say hello to the great shining
embroidered with your fleshy personality.
(The shining may be a clear hole, but if that scares you
think instead a rimless, bowlless, friendly bowl.)
I pull at our tight threads with poems.

Unraveling, I talk too much.
I’m paid to tell you what I know, but there are holes
in knowing funneling toward the shining hole,
and you fall through. I can’t catch you.

You can’t catch me.
We think our words are handholds,
or that our hands are words, but they are only bumps
stalling speed so fast it’s empty, so vast
even the sky falls through.

2012