a day later you’re in l.a. picking out cars with the magic
only money can buy

So many times I walked
head down   half asleep
along that ordinary road to school

She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love

unearths them

They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.

I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song

Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in
/ an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man

Formed into darkness
an octopus squeezes around
the spaces of a shipwreck.

My father walks backwards
better than most walk forward—
so whenever he sewed his steps into the living
room carpet, I rushed to mirror my moon-
walking, until he froze,
froze like he’d been caught
by the beat.

We found our eyes first,
as they swirled through fragments
of black jumper, dark pine trees
and an orange sunset sky