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Cardboard City
(1995)

I.

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

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 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 twig

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

II.

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

III.

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 in their music

In my meaningless strolls these nights,
The heavy Earth feels painful when I step on her
Soil and stone ruins collapse on each other in her 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

IV.

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

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