In a dream       the man with the indistinct face

I praised him three times, beat on him three times

On waking       near me had assembled many beautiful people;

I am coarse, I am tender

when you rush at the horizon’s flowing clouds, giggling like an idiot

twisting your sprinting knee till it snaps       like twisting

a sparrow’s neck till it snaps…where we stop

we remember some things that once bloomed

fresh flowers          buried shallow in the split-open soul

Have I ever been content? Have I ever renounced hostility?

Have I ever trembled in love without reason or cause?

An old star lights the provincial government     heaped bodies in the weeds

under a red regime I find a self as yet unnamed

he is precisely as incomplete              as he is exquisite

At night he can’t get to sleep            when he sleeps

he opens the eyes of the owl so wide —  

the moon’s shadow goes west           the thief has fallen asleep in his dream!

While you search for something

everything makes me search for you

but you slip my pursuit like a phantom.

You mummify my longing with this absence

and leave my bags on the platform.

I abandon this train.

I had hoped you might come to me

but now I unfurl my sails

hoping you will be a wind to take me, perhaps to our port.

Caravans of travelers caught on layover

realize their dreams are shut up in an iron coffin.

I remain on land forgetting departure

knowing the desert is stupefied every year by the burgeoning palms.

Wishing you would come

I postpone age. I postpone my struggle

and let time butcher me in my prime.

No one knows why women die waiting for twilight.

Why men die murderous in their desire.

Yet we live to love, as two strangers long to cross paths on a city bus.

You know that you will come to the platform’s darkness

where my heart appears behind the train’s windows,

and you’ll wave to me in the last seconds.

I cannot step off. I cannot step in.

Eventually we will know what happened between us.

The heart will have no right to beat anymore.

I repine on my seat

and a strangeness passes over me, certifying my solitude,

certifying the many cigarettes I shared, stranded, waiting long with others.

Clouds of smoke filled our room, flying easterly against the westbound trains

and snatching my baggage as required. We agreed, the smoke and I,

to leave love’s memory in the ink-black Tigris.

It is the heart that comes and goes suddenly

no matter its beating now.

No, I will not hunt for your childish face in this billowing smoke.

I will just lay down my head on the shoulder of impossibility

and, after waiting for you, refuse to relinquish departure’s roughness.