There will be more traumas, I presume.
Each documented in hopes they will lean
more towards blasphemy someday.
I do not want this for my honest.
Do not want pain for my truth
In 20 years the brunt of a world collapsing
upon itself has folded me paper crane.
And like them, it is easy to forget how quickly
the drowning seeps through.
I am not a genuine creature of flight,
but this is not fake water
In 20 years I have learned to love things
that don't stay long enough to watch me crumble
In 20 years I have learned to make my skin a pamphlet of pleas
from a woman striving to change somebody's mind.
And like so many love letters
I am found wandering through my travels
hoping to catch my lovers ear
lost in a shuffle of demands
on some strange terrain
with no return address
and a stamp reading
"return to sender"
He does not cry over women
did not know that
the nights he spent on the floors of our markets,
in the cracks of our country of our land baked him dry.
I ,9years old
a laundry list of prayers and despites,
a young girl creating all she will be
by what she will not, and all she will not
by what she has seen.
I found my purpose in what he was not
It was a pain to watch my father cry
letting out what little water was left.
Paving his drought and dusty dams
into a circling road,
one that would take him nowhere
far from where he is now.
This water, lost when his mother left
when life betrayed him
this water
nowhere to be found at the tragedy
of more loss. The deaths of his children
No where to be found, not like this
Not like my father
in the front seat of a taxi cab
he never pays dues on
in a suit bought
with the good conscience
that his children may be hungry and in want,
maybe market floored
houseless sun-baked-dry one day
all the water drained out of them
My father crying over a woman he beats
has cut,has lacerated troughs into her desert
Showing me the little water he has left,
has irrigated from her
offering a sacrifice
in a moment that wont leave me in 10 years
The moment Mohammad Yussuff
showed some sign in the dry soul of his skin,
that he might still be able to grow.
He was floods of everyman he was named after
Someone says the water will drown him one day,
it does. I do not know men that cry like him
but there was a boy
who learned the river and ocean of his mother
and sisters,
who swallowed their
moon to drown the ditch dug crevices,
make them bear water again, and maybe even fruit.
Bobby,
Mohammad, our father's namesake,
my cactus in a field of mirages and thirst
should you have learned to grow throns
as they asked of you
I would have nothing left.
You had no thorns to protect you
and so I have nothing left.
But the faint and fading memories of the only man
that loved me the right way.
My brother,
who sacrificed his life in hopes
that another young man
may hold on long enough
to tell the story
A boy ,who let a another he barely knew
cross a road, a dry path,
with destination in front of him
showed him to quench,
Was struck by a force much larger than him
heaved so high all this liquid
rained back into the heavens
left us wanting
You are my last,
my lasts always are
they cannot keep you here,
menelik,
tell me
your water still seeps through
your skin like mine
Have you heard me, my droughts
that I am unquenched
Tell me your water still seeps through your skin like mine
That you are still a conservatory
mornings of trickles, hurricanes
the sounds that give me hope
shouting through flesh worn doors
make me happy i never listened to anything else
That I do not read the signs meant to keep people out
Tell me that I am not another catastrophe
of women
drowned
stretched
and beaten
drowned, stretched, and beaten
soaked
crumbled
and left wrinkling.
You've said before
you will not cry over a woman again.
that your water will find itself nowhere here
made blasphemy of hope for this land,
these cravings and prayers left deep
landing hard on my pathways
after promising to make blasphemy of my doubts.
You must not know
what happens to men
that take the water out of women
Let them make their wet offerings
to find their shrines left with little or nothing in return.
Meet my father.
ask him how I got this way.
Tell him of the woman I've become
with roots drowning
crumbling chewed paper-wet
Branches cracking
Always trying to be a symbol of growth
in a land that says
It wants none.
