You

My friend used to say ‘We are young, there is plenty of time’.
You think: how much time? Nothing really changes except

you growing accustomed to doing one thing over the other, 
you growing familiar with the massive levity of ageing. 

You have tried out known assessments on weight:
giving up, starting over. Looking at yourself in the mirror.

Scrutinising platitudes, ritual. Defining I love you as promise;
as foreplay; as dangerous. But again there is the tangy bitter

of paracetamol, the sooty flower of a coffee stain. Even
the half-truth you erected to cushion another escape

is not unwelcome, like the callus on your thumb regrowing
after peeling it away. And summer wheezes in its husk 

and there are shadows racing across and when you wake up
in your balloon, you see Jaan Kaplinski in an unlit window, so humble

near his death. ‘What do you know about the pursuit of poetry?’,
he demands. When you go and find out, you see his countryman

mouth jokes to each other, laughing. A girl tells you in a hostel:
‘you think too deeply’. She says: ‘you should kiss me’. Later,

you: at the end of the transaction, ejaculating,
you keep looking at her wine-coloured birthmark. In the morning,

the rain-tanged aubade lulls the cemetery of the church, and
the mass inaugurated by the dissonance of a bagpipe, rings total.