For Nadya Ginsburg—

                    i.

Regarding lately the landscape of my
mind as real estate, I’ve been evicting
wasteful thoughts, thinking not of putting up
new walls, but strengthening my Self with more
lucrative self-talk, working now on love,
improving my resolve with much better
defences against this head nodding off

                    ii.

with anyone else but my Nadya in
its four-poster, California King-Sized
bed, surprised as I am that for so long
I let stand-ins get to command the set
every one of my fantasies had
as its tinsel backdrop their untamed claws
savagely ripped to shreds, untrained harpies

                    iii.

of understudies ill-equipped to fill-
in for my darkest art’s mega-wattage
co-star without whose glamorous lips my
own refuse to kiss hard anybody
else’s, not unless heaven’s eccentric
executive producer relents, bends
to my whim, reconsiders a wounded

                    iv.

heart’s budget, loosens his fist’s grip on those
purse-strings a little, lets me win, and gives
in to giving its hot-shot director
another chance at stitching together
this throbbing constellation of us no
other lover of mine has ever once
better strung me on and out with than she

                    v.

has with her myth, this Ginsburg kid whose gift
broadens my horizons without even
trying, inspiring in everything
she does and will do again, when I wake
from dreaming to find her on-screen healing
with a pun what has taken me so long
to move on from: feeling so unwanted.