All of my flaws are of my own making
A fading of polka dots
A line like indifference: dividing me: twins
A cut like a volcano
             (its perfection in progress, I poke and it grows)
A smile like a photographer’s command

Your baptism was not one clean plunge but
A series of frustrated failures
Moments futilely anticipated like
A roll of badly shot film, the sort of pictures
Re-sealed and put away, and never in an album, never framed
Is it anyone’s fault? Is it mine?

You’d never eat it if you didn’t know where it’d been
So what were you thinking,
Poaching pigeons on my infected land?

Your defects are hardly worth mentioning
I am working on it:
This is like saying, It is hardly there


05.27.01