Confessions of a Giver

If you need a path,

           I want to lay down and become tarmac,

           steadily extending to your horizon.

If you crave starlight,

           I want to make myself incandescence

           beginning four years ago and traveling from Sirius to reach you.

If there is a wound visited upon you,

           I am on fire to become the glowing ember of kindness

           to soothe away what was done.

If you have a need that cannot be named,

           find me driven to give it form, show it to you, help you hold it to the light

           so you can learn its dimensions.

For those I love and admire, these are my instincts:

           to give multitudes, to hold cactus needles, to heal the other,

           to give what I can, to give. And then more.

Try to hold this woman back,

           to brace her against herself with

           limits and logic and fear.

But girl has a way of slipping steadily past,

           of sneaking around the barriers moderately maintained.

           She’s crafty about ways to lose herself in the giving.

And now this much more difficult dawning: to receive.

            Tall order, she moans.

            Tiptoe height to begin, eyes peering over, more wary than curious.

I do not want it,

            what’s there for me.

            Won’t swallow. Can’t make me.

How a giver controls.