The year I made it, you weren’t there.
There were fragments of you
plastered on the walls of my throat,
clinging to my voice as if they owned it.
I was there, all eyes, open wide,
taking it in, years later,
always after the fact.
I was wondering where I lost my smile,
and there was its echo.

I see it now,
in the people washing past the subway trains,
my stare fixed through them.
I see it now, the last time I laughed,
stuck like graffiti to the grime.

The fact that I was walking with your ghost
may not be fair, but at the top of the stairs,
as the city splayed itself below
like an immense cadaver on icy grey,
I couldn’t even shed a tear.
I let the street cellist slice me wide
with every sweep of his bow.
He knew it well, that song to which we all bled:
“Je vous parle d’un temps
Que les moins de vingt ans
Ne peuvent pas connaître
Montmartre en ce temps-là…”

I thought I lost it, my voice,
but it was only getting hoarse
until I couldn’t recognize it.
I became a ventriloquist of myself.
And yet the yearning for song never quits,
the way my mother still attempts to dance every New Year,
her protruding kneecaps buckling under the weight of her soul.
It catches me there, the urge to sing,
where the pigeons take flight with horror.
It catches me mid sentence,
with a groan that rumbles like fear.
But I bundle it up—limbs at the scene of a crime—
and drag it here—choppy, bloody and raw—
here where no one sees,
no one hears, no one shudders,
and let it go.

I shall stand naked
above the city rising from the dust,
above the streets trampling the sea,
and feel as invincible
as the day my nudity mattered.

How short is the distance
between boys and men…
Hungry as a vulture I stand
craning my neck over you,
devouring what I used to be.

Interchangeable in a tyranny of desire,
we detail the manners in which
our flesh wraps around itself
in an emulation of wombs.

That breath on the neck at night,
the pressure of the skin where none should be,
we bite the apple with more love
than God can ever muster
for the body of Christ.

Ten years is what it takes
For us to turn into weed;
Ten years is what it takes
For the white roses to shed,
For an oud to rot and a flute rust.
Ten years is what it takes
For the humid nights to yawn
And collapse on the sidewalk in hazy slumber;
Ten years for all the winding stairs
to lose their stones,
For the spruce to grow dusty,
And for bright eyes to tire of the light.

Ten years, and we’re no longer there.

The curve of the road,
The cliff and how it hangs,
The cypress that lined the broken pavement
And swayed like they could read our minds;

Your room still fragrant
with fragments of my breath
plastering its innards
like dank wallpaper
held by song;

And the worn leather couch
Where I first believed in God
Still dimples under my ghost.

Ten years is what it takes
For the waves to take root on my shore,
Ten years for the promise to let go;
Ten years to return
To the first syllable,
The fuzzy hair, the freckled cheek,
The shoes flayed at the outset.

And somewhere in the hallways
Ten years before
A boy peers from around the corner
And goes…

To Obe

In two different orbits we circle now
Planets tethered to separate suns

In another dimension I float, I breathe
I speak where you cannot hear

We cross the earth telling the rest of the story
We intertwine like unraveling schemes

I glimpse the round of your head from a distance
From memory, scratchy and blue

I see you where you ought to be
In the absence I make you on the corner, on the street

But in another street you dwell now
One with an unfamiliar smell

The syncopated silences between us grow
Until nothing is left but retorts so delayed

They are rendered obsolete
A handle, an encoded song

Is all the dust that remains
From the burst stars we became

Like pieces of me
And I miss you
Every time
In spite of myself
Maybe I’m just bored
With my own company
Maybe I just like yours
In any case
Won’t you remember
Next time
To pack your absence along with you?

My mother told me
My hands grew larger
As she bid me farewell
My mother told me
She strung herself
A laundry line for my dreams.
How could I let them blow away?

There is nothing anymore ahead of me.

I stoop into the abyss of my memory,
Out of boredom.

I repeat myself, in endless tautologies,
I talk, but am tired of hearing my voice.

And they rush onto me
In heaps of illusion
Of a semblance of a reality that was.

And they hurl onto me
Their perfumed corpses
And seduce me with my own name.

And I cry.

It is not me that cries,
For I, too, have died.
It is the memory of me.

I snatch my existence,
I, the man who has everything.

The void thickens around me,
It relinquishes its absence,
It is bored into being.

I want to speak,
Say nothing,
But cannot even begin to articulate it.

I reach within,
For faces and thoughts
That quickly dissolve;

I reach for my self
That has already granulated.
I reach for where I am no longer.

I speak their names,
And, after the delay,
they echo back;

They tell me of how it went,
How it goes,
Without me.

They tell me of a life
Where I am not,
Of my world not missing me.

They tell me of my laughter
Ringing hollow in other ears,
Of words that have forsaken me.

For I am not, no longer,
I am Being folded on itself;
I am my absence materialized.