Ate well, drank less, exercised,
used valerian root and holy basil,
filtered rainwater and the northern breeze
and the rhetoric coming from outside,
paid attention to mental hygiene,
held doors and said “good job”
and pushed disabled cars off the road,
only to disappear without fanfare;
learned the definitions of words
like polloglyph and pareidolia,
prayed in the morning, meditated at noon,
stopped over-editing poems,
kept our interests compartmentalized –
politics, ping pong, peonys;
sought out the least likely person
and went all in for them,
repeated ourselves
only when the message was sound,
repeated ourselves
only when the message was sound;
entertained radical ideas,
like maybe the solar system is a mere atom,
a part of something so immense
we could never zoom out enough to see it.
