for N

Upon receipt of blue eyed affection, the stone-cactus man, who learned to survive on the bare minimum of things (books and oxygen) nearly shatters in delicious shock.

Somebody please caution the singing one not to touch him suddenly like this.

Note: Following music is on repeat

The movement between your speech And my silence is just like folding laundry. Take this white cotton sheet, for example.

It gleams between us in the afternoon; An empty sheet of paper waiting for a poem Of your body to be written tonight when I Soak my fingers in the red ink of your hair.

We begin to move it back and forth like an accordion: The snap of cloth, fingers brushing each others', And folds laid down, the way morning will find Us folded into each other, like two memories.

Note: A poem occasioned on watching a man and a woman fold sheets in a coin laundry, and the intense longing for the muse brought about by the shock of glimpsing the first blooms of lilacs in the ice-free yards, here in Toronto.