My better 
Angels, 
    
     I have restocked the travel kit 
with extracts and suspensions:

calamine, for
  Like sumac, ivy, and oak, 
  sometimes in a grove,
  up a wall, to the canopy
  I’ve crawled just to feed the birds
  yet left you burning in my wake.
drawing salve, for
  The aftermath of the blow I struck
  splintering my own makeshift raft
  to pieces, to bits
  using the first sharp heavy stone
  I found after my waves
  crashed us into that shore.
eugenol, for 
  Your broken tooth.
  When we met, I never should have
  punched you in the mouth. You
  never mocked me, 
  nor tugged at the braces
  on my ankles, my vestigial toes,
  nor placed them there to begin with.
witch hazel on a branch, for
  Whatever purpose you see fit.
coarse dirt, for
  Scrubbing away the dumb graffiti
  now that I’ve covered most of my walls,
  your soft shell, your goosedown wings.
  I was too fucking lazy
  to open a damn dictionary,
  or to run the gotforsaken
  spell check feature that’s
  built into the system, for
  Fucks’ sake. I lost any 
  sense of relative bearing that way,
  as always, letting up,
  getting sloppy when I should be
  triple-proofing the charts.
lanolin in a square tin, one
fine-tined silver comb, pure
hot lye soap, strike
anywhere matches, placed
on a dish besides several curls of
fragrant birch bark.

  Ephemeral waterways boil today,
  but walk with me still,
let’s go as far as we can, 
see when we reach water
and I can wash my hands or,
if we walk far enough then,
  maybe, for us,
You can
at least at last
call in the tide.