if you find something
small, leave it.
it was meant for someone else.
don’t be so hungry for beauty or meaning
for that kind of hunger
lives by feeding on itself.
you are neither Rasheed nor Mary
who wrote their love in 2011 on
this bathroom wall.
you only ever had a marker or a blank hunger,
never both.
tell someone nearby about universality
and why little boys who’ve never seen guns
pick up sticks and shoot them.
don’t tell yourself these things were meant
for you, these little droppings
to collect in your phone,
skating across the palm of
your hand.
eventually a neighbor will lose their child
to some kind of horrible
and that too will have to have been
meant for you.
the book you’ve been looking for
is marked “free” and sitting in a box of rain,
tasting like the sigh of the storm.
post no bills
untrace what’s been drawn.
leave that all here
sight unseen.