astrocytes

The fear is standing still head bent over in front of me

Servile and yet manipulative

When did I become a coward?

Drinking a coffee when I stumble through the door

And if it brought me any closer he watched me with tired eyes

And sat me down and knew me

When I was done

He sent me on my way

And I turned and I turned and I turned.

Sometimes in my late nights I throw my shoulder before my neck

And I hurt to know that I’ll never meet anything

That smells like coffee beans or

Looks like a yellowed map of the world

And through this he forgives me faults

But if he truly understood me

He’d know I want no reprieve

Like a beaten dog again and again

I crave the castigation that I believe I deserve

For all my shortcomings.

Presumably to be with his mother

Kneeled at her feet

A young man of 33 again.

The sweetest winds kiss his face

When he meets his mother.

What is it like to meet god

Knowing all your flaws

Understanding you so deeply

Forgiving of all your faults

And then to never meet him again.

My grandmother tells me about her 10 siblings and

About the time she asked her mother

Why she had so many pickney

And how her mother just stared at her

In that hot sun like she was mad

And then walked to the cane fields

16 and 22

Their chair legs met

Before their eyes did.

Azim you will die before her.

My grandmother sits in my dining room chair

Volume full blast

AI voice narrating a love story.

She’s just a little girl, after all

Who they stunted at 16

Aamna, he will live longer than you think.

Oh darling when it comes it will not be so tender.

I know that you loved me when I was nothing

Your words sway over the bridge

When I was careening

The bird pluck their feathers

We preen and forgive each other

I didn’t throw my grandfather’s ashes because

Muslims don’t believe in cremation

And I wonder where you are and what you’re doing

Run with me azim

Us two dolphins in the waves.

Maybe on the beach

You grow years alongside each other, do you exist without your brother? You can go to the past but there’s no one there. But could you have predicted the chasm he would fall into and that you yourself couldn’t pull him out? That someone else’s hand could stay while yours failed?

Every day a heat, in dead last.

When you dream so close

Who comes to mind?

Your mouth making words, and is it the way

They communicate to you?

So easy to sleep

But impossible to remember

The little affirmations moving your lips

When you dream.

Pray to your benefactor

When he lays his hand on your shoulder.

Will I dream of my mother also

Will she dream of her father

Their steady hands guiding me into parts unknown.

I exist alongside them.

To that thing that will so lovingly take it away from me

Look to your pictures and where the blanket contoured you

The winds are whistling

And I’m with my brother

And my mother

And my sister and my father

And when it comes I will go.

Peacefully with arms at my sides and

That wretched confusion on my face

But your eyes gazing deep into mine

Etched in my brain

And I hope that where you are is far from where I am

And will you carry the memory of me accepting your gaze

Knowing I went when I went, and that I went with ease

Like last night’s vomit but imprinted onto your skin

Anxious wretch whose heart betrays him

And he lays awake in the anticipation.

It was his fear that gave in

But you live with it in the morning

Rotten fetid fear of yesterday

Where I buy souvenirs to the people that have passed

And set them down

For them to see how far I have traveled away from them

And when I leave they gather dust in darkness.

For a brief moment I can taste their existence so

Sweet it aches

Do you know the way home

By the lamplit streets?

The girls bars soliciting in neon.

Do you know where you are without me?

Walking down kappabashi street.

Did you watch me walk ahead

And assume that I had no pain

Again and again I will choose you

If you allow me the humiliation

Of offering myself.

Husks

Thick as thieves

Business as usual

Drive me to the river

We don’t let’s, we carve our way up the river

In mutually assured destruction we saunter upstream

We don’t speak we just gaze

I hammer and he checks

We decide and return.

We we we