A country mapped with invisible ink
Like we are the hole that grows in poor, unmendable
nothing: we blind needles: we unmoored threads:
like feeling I’m the enaction of a waterfall by my tongue
.
upon your body, as when a boat is brought to the edge
of exile and a hand extends to a hand or a tree
beseeches with its shadeshawl: however born,
.
there is reaching, we agree the wind smelled of copper
one day, a passport the next: like how to escape
my brain’s slum of words, the ghetto of the said,
.
while adoring there the rocks, the teacups,
if half of me is a Molotov cocktail and half
the inflection of loss and half a genuflection
.
to breath: like wondering if this extra half
is a country mapped with invisible ink:
like how windows ask to come along with the going
.
and preside over the staying, and I look at them
with all the love, all the shatter I can muster:
shards cutting me when I try to put the sky,
.
the distance back together: boredom cutting me
deeper when I don’t: like searching for a man
in a burning house and finding a piano as echo flees:
.
a whetstone still warm from the blade: sheets pressed
with brainfolds of sleep: a whisper from the bathroom
of running water: but no body: and I carry
.
these things to safety that are not the man: the piano
in my arms, running water in my mouth, the vespers
of sleep, the knife, so like a wing, like flight:
.
and say of him, that was me, to the ashes, the char:
and sift the memory of flames for their sorrow,
holding smoke to the mirror interested only
.
in solid dreams: like it will finally see
what isn’t there and give it my face, this presence
of absence I have tried and tried not to be
**********
“almost as if I’m making her and this poem and my past
up as I go, to help me feel nothing
.
goes to waste, not even waste.”
-also Bob Hicok
All my Words are Silent 