Things begin with awakenings, today At dawn, six thirty, on one side of me A wall of books holding fort, the wall With a window on the other side.

You then surely must have attacked me From above, from the roof, descending From the sky, a black dive bomber.

These days on your hands, I see A holographic diorama of fucks. Perhaps the imagination of my memory is stronger than your memory of the past. And it’s memory that makes life such a bitch.

You know how to absolve memory In every new pelt that covers you, which you read and place inside of you, Till you become a library of congresses, Till you lose track of the number of those volumes.

I, however, polish all my memories into knives, which I carry on my back. I hunch under their weight. Such is the punishment for ignorance and such is the training to fight you as you tumble out of the sky to drop your bombs.

In the shadows greened by the foliage Of the woods, the quiet of the universe Meets the tumult of desire.

We too search for quietude In bars, in other bodies: penetrating them Or letting them penetrate us.

But we don’t meet it. It grows distant In every successive dream of which we Remember only the most tantalizing pieces.

These ripen like tomatoes in pots of poems, As nipples do inside someone else’s mouth. We open our mouth to eat and taste air.

As unsatisfied as we are, we must learn to stalk What we seek, in the woods filled with flowing water, Our vast hearts, those conduits of blood!

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born. I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own. I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon, a bird's sustenance, and an immortal olive tree. I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey. I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to her mother. And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears. To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood. I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.