CALL ME BELOVED

lately I can sense a hole within me. I’m drafty,
and I feel it as acutely as a window left ajar.
maybe it’s because I’m expanding, somehow –
comsuming and reaching out into my own emptyness
like the lazy stretch of the universe.

this hollowness is strange, to me –
not a space left behind by something removed,
but more like the shoebox a younger self kept,
a repository for the manivaried victims of my
indiscriminate and frantic sentimentalism.

it’s like a knothole in a tree, a necessary
and irrevocable part of my whole, waiting
for an occupant to nest inside and call it home.