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Friendship will manifest itself in doing all it can for its beloved. It's actor and verb with object. Its beloved need not be ours, but contains it like a hold. Kittens play in concert, which is not to say together. Ineffective as water, our complaints to the mayor. We feel so sorry for the kids, those on bikes who live in tents. Sorry is another country from our own; we go there to the spa of guilt and sorrow. The sun that strikes us with dense shadows sends postcards from the confessional. Priests enter a vocation of forgetting. That's what forgiveness is, moral amnesia like dots accumulating on a camera's lens. “You remembah when?” the small white woman with dog recites. Her mother-in-law Dot died last month. The woman wearing a Tuskegee Airman cap said her grandpa was a poet; his name was Basil Bunting. The Hawaiian activist described himself as “full Chinese.” You know how Thomas Square got its name? he asked. I sit at my table to receive your names in my outstretched palms. I am your free speech zone, your confessional, your merchant of poems. Why move on so easily without them?

--4 May 2015