write a haphazard, imperfect poem every day.

Don’t know how—
when the future is
teetering like a home
on an eroded cliff—
these would be
my instructions now:
Be empty,
and walk.

It is when you fall down
as a child, the first sense of when
perfect, gleeful inertia abruptly
hitches on
an unknown snag. Your bones are
too compact to break,
your muscles too short, still
soft before the world
has tensed them.
Your small foot without warning
fails to follow the other,
and then you land in
the inescapable moment:
one great pound
in your spine and chest,
solid ground, sudden silence, and
new astonishment at how
things can change so suddenly.