sometimes
i want my foot bare
on the floorboards
getting so dark it soils the sheets
when i crawl in too tired to care
sometimes i think i don't know
my feet in their short wide
punctuation of the rooms
i inhabit with the grammar
of a meaning i have never
quite believed
and sometimes i just want
to believe that it is possible
to live here and build now
without this burden
of next
and sometimes my foot
looks up in shuffling silence
its mute history
waiting for my hand
to find another it could take
and hold onto
and in that conjuration concentrated
on palms i do not even
know if my feet
are part
of my loneliness. -Jim
Perkinson
