In the world of friends, where travel is slower,
What do you do there, in the world of rain?
Who shares the segments of your tangerine?

We fly above Kenitra
Circling so low
I almost smell the fig trees’

Scraped the last $8.48
from the glass jar.
Your day’s worth of tips

at the nail salon. Enough
for one hit. Enough
to be good

till noon but
these hands already
blurring. The money a weird

Nel mezzo del cammin what one finds is beans
and wrinkled cabbage and an awful case
of ambling vacuity, an affliction resembling

Ink

I am looking for a word from you.
I’ve combed the landscape of my body,
I’ve travelled its dark rivers.

High above the congregation of the laminated waters,
muscular and clear, that deeply and to great

effect reverse themselves in diurnal, layered turnings,

It's the rhythm and small plosive bombs in the mouth,
on the lips of the whisperer (me) who would like
in the best of all possible worlds to rhyme

 It’s hot in this red room,
inside the beating heart of the ritual, explosive
now with duress, bleeding its stress

You waited at the station entrance.
I was late. My hair had turned gray
but there you were, all the snow gone,
all the leaves blown, the leopard sun
having leapt across a life never lived.

My less erotic god condemned
my taste for girls less classical
than you, the kind that can’t resist