Alone

alone is not the same as oneness:

alone means death lurks through shadows

in an empty house while spiderwebs create paintings

on the wall; a creak is a heart-felt speech which moves

the mushrooms in the garden to take action;

the drip of the kitchen sink rings out over the hardwood floors

and to your leather chair where you are alone

with your books, your pens, your journals and the unopened letters

upon letters from your estranged son—your husband took him

years ago because his mother spent all her time

polishing clock faces and conjugating her feelings

to lay them out on the table, analyze them and somehow

turn them into a cup of black coffee and green ink

oneness is dig dig digging up the solutions

to philosophical equations, turning them into tulip bulbs

and planting them onebyone in other's delusions;

candles rimmed around a bathtub light up in the moon

shining through the skylight; where car rides and water parks

make you think that maybe you should have brought a sweater;

a little wooden shack just off of the highway where one

carves another's initials into the rain-worn wood

with an office key and where a mouth lurks over and eyes look through

the gaps in the wood so that no one knows intimacy exists

off this beaten path; oneness is twoness while alone

is all one.