jr

You Wrote Much Better Poetry in High School

Don't say one thing,
when it means another.

Just because you whisper,
that doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

Your mouths' both sides are many.
I have felt them again and again.

They are sweeter when angry,
softer when sobbing, distant if distant.

No two ways about that last one,
when heaving nightly for your heart scraps.

We, the little people with big problems,
both then and now.

You did not speak in doubles to the rich kids.

If I beg an equal courtesy,
please gun me down,
aim softly,
re-plug an exit wound or two.

You wrote such better poetry back home.



Go photograph your obsessions for him.

Mount me against the tenement,
with your tiny hands or frames,
just different bars to the same cage.

Push "bloody hard."

I hate how you think
you are European,
or poor, or a poor European,
when you are not.

You speak so softly of this long run.

Tongue all my ear.



God bless these songs of brick and rain.
You make your lies of clay and mortar.

Their shadows yawn as they go on and on,
cast across my night shifts,
like sheets across my bed,

from which they uncurl in the morning,
your lies becoming my lies,
as she, a stranger, turns to me.

I wake with your name on my lips,
as she, the stranger, whispers
her naivet into my ear.

This is how my workday begins.
I lace my boots at six AM.

It is like slowly sewing
up a silent death
while she sleeps in.


- JR