Cardboard City

(1995)

For years I sprinted to find the other wall in the infiniteness of my confinement

In its darkness I did not sense the shadows that persisted to surround me

Like groves of trees

Those were the standing shoulders of my ancients

Once wandering desert Bedouins

For years I sprinted to fall on the other wall

In the infiniteness of my confinement

II.

I stood in your eyes

Fields of lilacs

Their flesh wall permeable like dark gates into caves

I’ve Journeyed to their other side since a time unremembered

Since a time unremembered

The skull of my head had been open from above

Vulnerable

To the wind and to your voice

Its delicateness caused pepper tears to swell in me and descend

Spilling as the stars of a solemn night

Smelling like the sweet scratchings of green walnut twigs

My arms pulled down

Embedded into the asphalt of my confinement

Their branching roots stretching under

To follow my running like a trail of connected regret

III.

It is all I know

This it is

My city from whom I scream

My city wherein I run

Her grey walls taste of bitter history like my tongue

I breathe within me jasmine breaths

Chants that hover to her breast

She hears then my objections

But proceeds to scratch me then lick me face to foot

These are the shrieks of a runaway slave

Whose hair is the traintracks on which the wretched travel

Whose heart is the simple orange they peel

Whose fingers of dirt they suckle

For fragments of taste in their lives

I’ve slept in the belly of the gorge of the city

My lashes are her forests of grey weary men

My raw hide is her asphalt

Stretched out like a dead field

My eyes shatter their brown

In the dispersing of moths to her street lamps

In the pulp of their hour

Brothers spear for each other’s faces

With identical battle cries

IV.

These nights

I am a kingdom of charred plastic children

That lay in the streets disregarded

These nights I abandon for you my words

Juicy red petals

In the rubble of puddles

These nights

My heart is untame in my breast

Lusting to learn love

My fear is for my poor heart

That it may grow rusty grass on its side

If left neglected

That my heart’s fingers are left to decay

To flake like demolitions

I have never ignored the faint shrills of the dead in the night

Them I do not comprehend

Listen only for the blue and green in their music

In my meaningless strolls these nights

The heavy Earth feels painful when I step on her

Soil and stone ruins collapse onto each other in her circular motion

In a perpetual longing for the surface of a lonely moon

These nights

I no longer know the taste of hope

Souls burn with a lust for sorrow

Tragic is my fleeing that runs to die in the beautiful Earth

Under lightning dagger stabs that permit no rest

Love becomes a slowly learned betrayal

Mere assassinings

Your simple drizzles

My love left squandered

Weeping blood into mud

The thirsty cardboard of our lungs

Scraping between the distant exhaustion of us both

Longing in the prolonged sorrows that are born in these nights

Longing for the voice that persuades away the tension of clasped hands

Longing for the eyes that widen to gaze at the lover approaching

Who shall command my own eyes

Who shall pluck the lilies of my teeth beneath the watchful moon

When all other Earths have failed me

I plant my shadows between the evening rocks and your sad freckles

I sleep in the lost capacity of your skin

••