A poem you sit on. A poem you lie down in and call home. A poem that has pockets. A poem that’s toasty on a cool night.

A poem that’s a place that’s a poem about a place.

A poem with protests and threats and gun shows and flags. No, not that poem. This one: a poem with barometric pressure and wind in the scrub and common ravens cawing in the air, talons curled beneath their abdomens.

A poem that’s a pencil sharpener because things can be both things and places. I heard that yesterday and I believe it. Poems believe it, too.

A poem you show to all your other poems. A poem you dress up and take to a parade. A poem with a tiara.

A poem with a behavioral problem. A poem with a hypertrophic scar. A poem with a past.

A poem that launders money through your account. A poem that has a second home it somehow paid for in cash. A poem with a boat at the marina and a state record for largest fish caught in a manmade lake. A poem that’s the grand master of its masonic lodge.

A poem that makes you feel what it wants you to feel. A poem that holds you. A poem that negs, that tucks you in at night, that says I’m sorry, that makes sure your feet are covered the way you like before it rocks you to sleep but always against its stomach, always a little too tight, and it’s rocking, too, against you, and another poem is yelling stop at the first poem but the second poem’s been drinking and the first one says don’t listen to that poem so you sleep in the first poem’s arms the way it wants you to, whatever sleep is, whatever that feels like, floating maybe. Maybe floating. Maybe darkness. You can’t ask the poem, not that poem. So you make another poem you can talk to. And another.

Like a poem you can stand on. Like a poem you can kick. Like a poem you kneel to. Like a poem you run from.

Like a poem for the dead. Like a poem for you when you’re dead. Because you’re already dead even though you’re living. You’re deadly alive. We all are. The poems say so. Because a poem is a body and also a place because poems can be both bodies and places. Because this means the poem is already dead, as dead as a body, as dead as this place will be someday long after poems are gone and the last raven has flown over what would have been our heads if we were still here.

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The idea that a pencil sharpener is a place is something someone said in the poetry workshop last night, along with the observation that things can be both things and places, not just one or the other.