Ginsberg in Purgatory

While we’re here in hell’s waiting room,
surrounded by tabloids and hairdo mags,

               I touch your hand and feel absurd. I want
               to worship at the church of your dirt, smell

of fresh mulch and broken stalks of grass.
How long till we succumb to the soil ourselves?

               I don’t want to be a satellite or make a museum
               out of you. Once, I had never been touched

by the barest torso of a thought. Inhaling
a little scrap of death was the gentlest

               damage you could give me, like an updraft
               reviving a wind-inflated plastic bag. (I count

my fingers to know I must be lucid.)
Though our personalities are perpendicular,

               we muster the strangest kind of magic, like
               making Michelin-star meals from watery mustard.

We are not our ancestors, you remind me.
Sometimes, we are not even ourselves, so let us be

               the empty space where we were five paces back,
               shoeprints burning holes of absence in the concrete.

You remind me that to change is to die, and in doing so
to live forever. You make a secret museum

               out of me, like an underground boxing ring,
               or an underground kissing ring where if you win

you earn every light that sobers this dark night:
lit tinder, lava lamps, lightning bugs, the hellfire glow

               of cellphones glancing off cheeks. I touch your hand
               and read its table of contents like a long list of heartbeats.