Your Selflessness
I’d like to see you selfish for once.
I want to see you tip the waitress in quarters
then complain about the cost of the meal.
As we make it to our car, our bellies full
of love and pasta, you remember the boy
in high school who could put away four plates
of food at the buffet. He is gone now, a closet
suicide. Only you remember his laughter
and the assurance of his loud voice.
He is kind in your memory, a place where no one
else can intrude. Sometimes you know how his
hand held yours all the way back to the first grade.
The night is in flight from our upturned faces,
the spouts of our noses.
I walk away from our family tree with you in tow
and that boy from school speaking your name
behind us.
On your belly you shall go, I say to you,
as you face me, ashamed of the memory
of someone no one could help. Life is the garbage
we collect along the boulevards and side roads.
The words we speak to each other cannot be
trusted. They creak like old wood between out feet.
As a generalization water is as hard as iron.
The truth is buckshot splitting a face, a garbled
mess of consonants breaking teeth, a refuge
for beasts of all kinds, briars I take to my
breasts, the heart of a girl beating in folds
of linen. The truth takes victims, people who want
out of what is right, what is coming. You sharpen
your gaze against a rock, balance
a child’s skull in your hands, one with a bullet hole
in the back.
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