(Tres Poemas de: Así es como el mundo regresa)
Take Everything
The showerhead washes the grit from my face
As I slow down long enough to see you
Fading under your linen sheets.
Don’t go,
I want to whisper into your ear,
Scream at your dry tears,
Write in the sky with a jet plane.
But I don’t.
Because you’re too far gone to hear a whisper,
Too numb to the sounds of my screams,
And I’m afraid of heights.
I let out a chuckle
Because laughing is better than wounding.
The calendar is empty,
Hanging on a cracked wall
With all its pages torn and tossed
Into our overflowing garbage bin.
I want to kick it,
Knock it over
And watch the contents of our years
Spill by me
Like a river of lost blood.
But I’m too tired.
I don’t want my heart back.
I don’t want to tape those pages
Collected in chronological order.
I don’t want the paintings we made together,
The words I regret saying
Or those poems you never read.
I don’t want the hours we devoted
To blowing away responsibility
Watching sitcoms on the filthy rug.
Take everything.
Take the silence.
Upon Unborn
Here would you lie under mud and sand,
If you had grown enough to stand.
So quick did god prepare to write you in,
As everlasting the gape you left deep and thin.
Though truth be you were never here,
Forever you exist in obscure moments of fear.
Stay
The stones were made of foam.
They would leap up from the dirt like bullets,
As if the world were on its side.
Time used to feign in your presence.
The foam stones have grown.
The boulders now look like the art
Of a dried out mother
In need of –
We used to watch them melt by the moon.
She would wake at dawn’s whisper
To sneak a smile of pride.
You had been feeding her foam.
She grows deeply ill, but
You are no longer around to see it.
No one is disappointed now.
Our children love you because
They never knew you.
Sometimes I see you when I visit.
They stand, now more tall and arrogant,
Casting shade over the slim round slab.