Meditations on Anicca by two aspiring buddhas With our god's eye view of us: in the spray of roses that tremble on the tabletop from the thrusting bed, your lotus-soft fingers on my lips spelling 'feel' and 'live' in strokes as fragile as your collection of china dolls, as your poet's heart says: i will be anything to you — like the plum tree bears both fruit and bare branches in proper seasons —, the dim sum carts are rolling past one on the wall of a chinese restaurant in berkeley: it is neither, but in bloom: those frail petals, fluttering fighting for fruitation, arise from nights spent on windowless sills, smoking — until the hand shivers like a sick child: who drinks in dim bars, falling asleep to jazz or who huddles with the homeless, to wake under the shadow of after-midnight new moon: alone, hoping to discover a blue-painted jungle gym, a dragon of bars from which joy hangs like a paper lantern; but these children's constructions have grown too complex: you say of its structure, "too postmodern" while we sip coffee in the midst of wall-cracked shops and post-industrial wasteland, what you deem lovely; and home, a warehouse room: the reek of rotting floorboards made by the woman-next-door who set fire to her wastebasket with incense, praying for a rain of sprinklers to wash away her weary existence into the downtown Oakland lake — where a blackbird finds a fine balance on a buoy, between flight and fall: wings waving ... we see the ending. Driving back across the san mateo bridge, gray-blue ocean surrounding a thin strip of land — we are silent while passing toll booths, without our licenses — and dukkha: the sorrow of the finite, speaks its subtle, soft-spoken voice saying, " ."