i'm hastening slowly trying to get to the water when i hear my name called and you come from the corner where all the fellows gather for chess and stories. i want to keep walking, not to evade you but to get to the water. there must be something urgent far more than my urgency. you don't have teeth so everything has an o sound, except some words are clear, like sublimation. a fine word. you said that word, among some others, when you showed me a poem about desire. i know you. i know i knew your name. something has changed. did you have teeth before? something slipping. i saw you before on the park bench alone talking, with subdued emphasis, trying to make a point. i should have given you something. maybe that was it, and you were too shy to ask. i said i'll see you on the way back. now you are at the picnic table that's warped and melted like the memory of barbecues under a great reaching oak. you seem preoccupied, i don't want to disturb, i don't want to sneak by. i want to know what's going on. i just wave. a small wave of shame. i'm afraid of a need that's too great, i can't meet. i want you to like me. i want you to write some more poems. i remember a guy who sold poems up in bucktown. xstine called it fucktown, from an ad in the reader rental classifieds saying  fucktown, fucktown, fucktown, that really got her attention. oh that guy just wanted to sell something for money, i'd have just as soon not, so i did. i didn't like his poems, he was pushy pushing pushy poems. one wants poetry to be free i guess, and one wants not to be pushed by need. even one's own, one wants to fill it like a poem, with sublimation. we need poems, yeah. poems without agenda but desire. poems don't want your money. there was no sublimation in bucktown man, just a wad of photocopies. you just had the one, folded and soft edged, the shape of your pocket. i wonder do you carry it? no. did you bring it to show me? yes. 
i'm afraid of need, but doggonit, it was you that gave to me. tomorrow i'll bring you five bones for the poem you already gave, and the pictures and the heart. i know you man.