Here’s another poem I never wrote,
said it to myself late at night.
to my toes turning on the Hot.
“Perfect,” I say. So simple.

Lie back in a ditch, beside a road,
dusk to dark, scratched a line, or two.
Last night, again, against the rocking
             spreading slick,
washed up here I guess.

Sleepless trees, another;
Charlie, my brother, the albino, shoulder
for my head. We bought us a loaf of bread.
Charlie Whitman. Read him Self-Reliance
till it was too dark to see. Even Charlie who glows.

“Just go,” she said.
Those two words. “Are you Ed?”
Nights when everything I think
begets another, should I
get out of bed? No.
I kept it in my head.