There are words we should never speak aloud
on earth, things we should spare one another.
Who has been more hurtful than the living?
Only the dead can still claim to contend.
On earth, the things we should spare each other
outnumber the names we have made for them,
those which only the dead still claim. Resist
shouting for sex, wagging your finger, wrongs
that outnumber the names we have for them.
But don’t believe that you’re too good or bad
to welcome love in your hands at the right
time. We are abandoned in the blank space
that gives no thought to the bad or the good,
since both are worse from life and its living.
We’re all alone beneath some lonely sky:
the words we need but cannot say aloud.