I will stop doing everything I don’t want to do

like sleeping in past eight or getting bored

in the drugstore self-checkout line.

Ants curling in synchronized task

don’t impress me anymore.

The full moon looks like a raspberry,

a five-year old declares, and this is my magic.

Nothing is not in conversation

with everything. Beneath the clouds

a mountain lion traces a body into a mind

afraid of dying. The pause between inhale

and exhale disintegrates in space, reassembles

as another gray hair. Get all the air out

to sing a little longer. An unwritten letter

teases an ache from the ether. The unopened

prison letter teases out letters for this poem.

Let me hold off transcendence

for another tomorrow. I don’t not want to die,

just not yet.