Three Poems

SHOULD’VE KILLED ME WHEN YOU HAD THE CHANCE

I text someone I love & miss we are closer to tomorrow than we’ve ever been before while sitting in the back of a car with its engine groaning through a wall of traffic because there is a man in the middle of the street wandering back and forth & singing a song I cannot make out but the way he’s singing it tells me it is a love song by which I mean he is twirling into each vowel long & slow like he will miss it once the last of it trickles into the air which is humid today & thick with misery the clouds hang over a sign telling me the price of everything has gone up the clouds are black over a billboard saying there is no way out but god the man in the street is singing a song where the word youuuuuuu goes for so long it takes his breath away & he falls to his knees & if there are horns I cannot hear them the person driving the car I am in is in the front seat crying & is crying in the way someone cries when they don’t want you to notice he is shaking gently & surrendering to small gasps & this too is how I know the man must be singing a love song the man who is now on his knees two arms extended to the billboard telling us there is no way out but god the billboard isn’t selling god as much as it is selling a door that can only be opened by faith the billboard doesn’t tell us what we need to find a way out of but we can invent it as we go along & I wonder if the person in the front of the car misses someone who is alive or dead I suppose in a moment with enough time & distance the heart cannot tell the difference I love you so deeply I whisper your name & a door opens I mean you are somewhere else in or beyond this wretched world & I am crawling atop the grains of sand that separate us no one I love wants to be god you feel me no one I love is coming back from the dead to save anyone least of all me least of all the man on his knees in the middle of the street who has now surrendered to the cops someone was foolish enough to call & the cops are dragging the singing man past the car window & I want to tell him I love you & we are closer to tomorrow than we’ve ever been I want to hold your face in both of my hands & tell you I think of you whenever someone is so in love they demand to stop the world which is another way out forgive me god forgive me for this doorway I have built on my own I want to kiss the cheek of everyone I love & tell them we are closer to tomorrow than we have ever been we are closer now than we were when I began here across ocean across ache across unbearable heat across empire we are closer to an ending for someone & it must be someone else it must be someone else it can never be us

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DRIVING MY FRIEND TO THE SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT AT DAWN WHILE LISTENING TO RINA SAWAYAMA’S VERSION OF “LOVE IT IF WE MADE IT” AND I AM SAYING THE THING IS YOU DON’T THINK IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD

because you have loved someone once & the love was so alive that you stopped believing in endings altogether. your optimism insists that at the end of one world, a new one emerges by the will of two people so in love they invent a life out of whatever is left over. enough to build a fire. enough to sing whatever songs they might remember, including this one. this specific version, where, at the end, you can hear the singer gasp while the final chorus arrives & the gasp is one of surprise & indignance, like the only cloud in the otherwise unblemished sky had dragged itself over the sun & stayed there as a cruel joke & I get it. I walk outside & am surprised by the volume & velocity of my desires. I tell you we need to make peace with the fact that the world has already ended one hundred different ways & you say ok sure, but I would still like to be kissed from time to time & who am I to argue. last year, I wanted to be kissed & woke up in someone else’s bed in Miami where, the night before, water rose through the cracks in the sidewalks. could be worse. there could be nothing and no one wanting to consume you. Wordsworth said I wandered lonely as a cloud which is romantic until you consider the violence of interruption. the haunting of an otherwise perfect sky, which this morning is clinging to the exhausted black of night the way I replay the last voicemail of the friend who died & the last voicemail from the one who tried to die but didn’t & then moved away & never called again. you are bored, I know, with my insistence that Rina has translated the song from an exercise in ego into an exercise in longing. I insist the singer is saying I will go where you go which is not the same as I will survive if you survive. I promise I would believe you if you told me we loved each other in another life. this morning, I am driving you across a bridge at an unadorned hour. An hour so clean, it feels like everyone has died except us.

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WATCHING MY BEST FRIEND’S SON RUN A MILE, I CONSIDER THE WORK OF THE MAGICIAN WHO INSISTS THE WORLD

Is a horrible place. All that matters during your life is the time between witnessing the ordinary transform itself into the extraordinary, even if only for the frayed thread of a rapidly descending minute. An animal carrying its baby across a river makes you momentarily forget that, if it wanted to, the animal could kill. You spend a lifetime traveling towards the people you will love forever, and when you find them, you will momentarily remember that one of you will outlive all of you, which is also the ordinary turned extraordinary, the feather from the bird’s wing tucks into the wide-brimmed hat of your father & is never taken by the wind. I am learning that one major function of a child’s life is forward movement. How lucky, to get to ride the coattails of unhindered propulsion. I wonder, at what age does the world reveal itself to be terrible & how long can any of us hold back the revelations. At what age does the extraordinary transform into the brutal ordinary. The magician insists all that matters during your life is the look on the face of someone who is amazed by something that was once pain. Something that might still be pain, for you, but not for someone you love. I tell my friend I cannot believe these five year olds have to run a mile, I cannot believe they just disappear into the trees and then they come out later at some undetermined time I cannot believe that he will emerge, eventually, ten minutes older and still in awe of the world, I cannot believe he’s gone and then comes back with a slightly different heart I would not miss any of this I would not miss it for the world, the wretched and undeserving world where, for a moment, he emerges from the trees and looks up to see if the sky is still all there