if you can feel it, you can heal it

He wrote messages to me on the walls
of the buildings, and if I climbed the
fire escape of the tenement I knew
the kids in the too small blue shirts
would be playing on the fire escape
by hanging off the sides as if they
never fell.
I walked onto the roof and crouched
down next to the words he had left
for me there, and pressed my cheek to
the wall where his hands had been,
and tried to press his ghosts into me,
as if it were a substitute for the real thing.
The message was a map to the heart
of the jungle, and somewhere there,
I would find exactly what I was looking for.
I was either going to fight or let it go.
A sparrow landed with a sprig of olive in its mouth,
from the far off island of the blessed,
and I knew the clouds were never able to
alter the sky, only obscure it,
temporarily.