Room 102

If you want to kill a thing,
do not revile it.
Do not treat it as a dead thing,
fat and damp with squirming scavengers.
Do not shudder.

Do not pity it.
Do not treat it as a helpless thing,
bruised and punctured in bleak corners.
Do not cry.

Do not seek it.
Do not treat it as a lost thing,
puzzling and furtive in clandestine shadows.
Do not wonder.

It must not be a thing that is gone.
Gone things leave footprints.

The poem, the song,
the thorny king, the fortune teller
and the market seller.
The him and the her and the we of it.

Snub even its embryonic state,
the membrane and the eye-blink fusion of it.

In this way
tiny acts of murder happen.

In this way,
you kill a thing.