I ask you for kindness

because you are here, holding
your coffee mugs embossed
with trees, looking right
through me at reflections
in wells of laughter.

Do you see me?

Behind you,
piercing the wall,
half my torso
silenced with brick
though I rise from the elastic
earth like my kind
suckling.
Before I meld into rock
in the cast of this fissure,
stretch my shadow into reams
of smoke, untangle me into a sapling
again
to conjure a trunk
that curves away from this wall.