Sometimes the chain-link fence keeping-in the ivy
of your home, with bright posters on each wall
has more to do with information, with the way
faux-taut helices of metal and rust can be understood
not in-themselves, but in-how-you-might-hope-to-use-them.

Sometimes the leaves spiralled up the steel are more like tokens
ways to pretty-up a balcony, your love of things-growing
not like: the impossible furled bud at the tip, spitting up laces
like: I heard somewhere these things are beautiful—
I heard somwhere a person could love these things.

Sometimes a dog spits up grass walking by, your heart
skips a beat and your throat tugs empathetic
and you wish it were a thousand dogs, a thousand toroids
of wet hair keeled over—spacing like a magic-eye
of one big dog, itself. Sometimes
A thousand fences. Oh! A thousand walls.
Enough of them that we can choose.