Breathing underwater with your mouth open

My swimming instructor

drowned, leaving me

stranded and wondering

what technique

I had spent perfecting

would make

me sink.

*

A beginning poet will always write

about love.

An experienced poet will always write

about lost love.

And a poet at the last lines of their life will always write

about the love that made them lost.

*

What are poems

except paragraphs of Swiss cheese

and a prescription of lactose intolerance

to the world?

For no matter the milk that pusses

from fingered utterances,

there are no poems in suffering;

only suffering in poems.