"Wednesday Night Interlude."
I reach for love as often as the door.
I grab the past, tomorrow, or whatever
else lives above and behind me, preposition not in my hands.
I clench my fingers into the soil at weed roots,
remember what power I have, and am reminded what I do not.
I cannot touch ghosts or God, though I feel their weight
the same, their weight the same for twilight to speak.
See, my father's throat collapsed
before his voice became memory.
And now I dream of familiar ghosts, unsure which is him,
unsure which smile is mine to claim.
I know they aren't me, but they belong to me.
Like how one time, I saw a body rotted by a Glock,
like fruit left in the sun.
How the homie said, "That could have been either of us."
And how I've been exfoliating my skin and poking at bruises ever
since, scrubbing all that blood up to the surface,
trying to imagine my body become a painful myth, indistinct,
something that could have been but wasn't.
There's terror under my glamor, tender muscles
beneath my tenderness.
I started saying, "I love you" to my homies,
holding them longer than we allowed ourselves as boys,
until our breath makes us big the way it
makes us older and more desperate, more worthy
of celebration.
We are here, come from so many dead.
How could we ever be lonely?
That poem makes me cry.
I'm sorry.
Mm.