Tell me what, if anything at all, lasts.

I’m having a hard time with the impermanence of it all.

If the damned lyrical dance of love and loss is all I can trust,

well I better grow thicker skin…

or surely it’ll all be shed before I’m 40.

I reckon, I too, wasn’t built to carry on so long.

Just can’t seem to get comfortable in this business of letting go.

I’d rather hold something so close within me

that I feel the weight of its breath,

thick and heavy with trust,

soft and wanting,

knowing that together we belong…

that together, against all the odds,

we have chosen to last.

Wouldn’t that be something.

*This poem is available in my book Soft With Me, printed and bound in Western North Carolina thanks to a grant from the N.C. Arts Council.