Misery doesn’t need to
make you miserable,
per se, 
since, if you were all misery,
surely you’d have popped already.

Word around town is that
miseries simmer
like red spots that bloom into 
pimples-to-be, tickling—
nigh-on yelling.

Though, I suppose, I don’t much mind.

To me,
they’re like bubbles in those
breath-holding moments
before they’re bubbles,
where soap sits in the wand
and your lips move as if to kiss,
yet cast away iridescent spheres instead.

Wouldn’t you say that bubbles are pretty
as a
patch’a hydrangea,
with colors beside each other
that you wouldn’t know were lovers?
I’d say so. When they
circle you like soap fairies
that’d follow you ‘til the moon fell,
if it meant another moment’s morsel
listing past your eye.

My miseries act like bubbles.
They walk with me and smell
like dish soap—
which isn’t pleasant,
but Lord knows I made most all of them.
And hating the smell of bubbles
is much like
hating the taste of cardboard:
cardboard and bubbles and miseries
aren’t really meant to smell or
taste good: they’re just
capsules for timeless things.

That cardboard box?
What else resides but myself?
Seven years of age,
skippering a paperboard sailboat,
smiling deftly into a
wakeless sea (whose name
I still don’t know).

That bubble?
What else resides but air
that I once breathed,
that once filled my very lungs
and carried my legs to the spot in which
I now sit and write this poem?
It may no longer be within me,
but I couldn’t have held it forever.

That misery?
What else resides but love
that could no longer live
within my body?