Escalate your patience
until it is steadily humming
past an old age home
full of open-mouth chewers.
Chewing cud like cows
on a field with nothing to do all day,
and you aren’t pulling your knuckle hair out
like a chimp.
Elevate your passion
until it is buzzing
slightly beyond your fingertips,
like a carrot on a fishing line
in front of a horse
barely out of reach.
Just enough to reach for,
every day.
Breed your loves
until they turn into too many.
Until love spills out of you fiercely;
just a gentle squeeze and all your sap
is on the floor for everyone to stick to:
uninvolved flies, paperclips,
an ingenious earthworm.
Abbreviate your curses
until they are reserved for deaths
and betrayals, instead of words
and words and failed relationships.
Curses are failings only
personal gods should hear.
Endow your fingers
with a nimbleness that sews hugs to sighs,
knits kneecaps for sufferers,
turns a strangled tear into the full-body sob they were on the cliff of,
your hands know these things already;
this martyr is a trip away from being drenched in the weight of other people’s problems, but a hop over a puddle reflects my underbelly,
lets me see the growths on my own skin.