With difficulty (2008)

Some Buddhist am I

drink
compulsively, & smoke

& I could write
the saddest poems of all
but you may never hear them
they are so quiet.

Let me be the poet asking,
‘how should each creature remember
to be happy?’

or ‘how will the fibres
of my book
flag a way out of suffering?’

Though writing lines like
‘what love there is to give
I have not given’ –

that is no way
to start,
or is it?

How to begin
again
again?

… there must be
much deletion

much deletion
before the sun goes.