September 13, 2016

a refrain

run with me down field, he said
I'll love you like a doll.
and when it ends, I promise you
I won't even call.

I hate that I can't smell the outdoors of you,
I can't hear you talking in your sleep, or reading
poetry aloud,  or see you shining the flashlight through my house
and I hate not touching you,
your belly,
your face.  and I hate that you intellectualize my grief.  And I hate secrets
and I hate cell phones and hallways and 7-11, I hate the pictures in my mind,
black vans and pupusas and bossa nova and I hate
tenor voices.  I hate that I understand you and all this hate

run with me down field, he said
I'll love you like a doll.
and when it ends, I promise you
I won't even call.

and I hate most of all that you came into my life a hurricane
and ended up rearranging my landscape so that every day I loved living
and you watered my dessicated lawn and then you dissipated,
and only destruction was left behind, and memories of excitement,
violence, and joy, and the something,
unspeakable but something, powerful of us.

run with me down field, he said
I'll love you like a doll.
and when it ends, I promise you
I won't even call.

Longing for Home

For Ali

--------

I don't know what it's like
to be landless because of
war,
to crawl on the ground in starvation,
bypassing the fallen figs
and drawing circles in the dust,
hoping for beetles.

I don't know what it's like
to have my brother turn in to
a little bird, following the buzzards
in their flight to sustenance in the
dead eyes awaiting in other places.

I don't know the ache of walking
in blood mud or the exhaustion of crying
for the old and the never young. I only
know terrible paradise, and the Hell of
not belonging there.