In life
if I could say for sure

what I have loved
there would be

no tunnel needed

How quickly we’re skimming through time,
leaving behind us
a trail of muffin crumbs
and wet towels and hotel soaps
like white stones in the forest.
But something’s eroded them:
we can’t trace them back
to that meadow where we began so eagerly
with the berry-filled cups, and the parents
who had not yet abandoned us
to take their chances in the ground.

Weeks on my back, counting
stars not up there, cutting quick
close corners in the wheelchair

Ralph kept moving true as oil,
questions silent in my mouth
after hearing a ragged sound

Those mornings in the last days of December,
as the smog deepened over the mausoleum
& the ghost of the emperor’s first wife
lingered about the four gardens, weeping
over her dead child

After the rape & the bloodbath, the savage king
& his men retired to a long shed built in an open
field by a thin river fashioned for this lull in the pillaging
so the horses could rest.

All summer the half voice lurked behind me

& I played deaf for days for to live

To not write about it to use my body

I close in on facts fine as sugar
poured from a bottle labeled salt,
comprehend nothing.

don’t read this text who knows what
it will open or close in you so read what
until now for so many years you read that

you’re home. eating lentils. talking to your
loved one. you’re abroad. eating lentils. talking to
your loved one. you’re not yourself. you’ve been stolen.
you’re talking to your lentils. you’re not a knife, not cotton.

Grubby, unknown child playing at my door,
I don’t ask if you bring me a message full of symbols.
I’m drawn to you because I’ve never seen you before,
And, of course, if you were clean, you’d be a different child,
You wouldn’t even come here.
Play in the dust, go on, play!