Genius
For Mishka and Stuart Hoosen-Lewis
Old friend, this is goodbye. I’m journeying
once again into the wilderness, but this time
without you. I promise you that I won’t think
of you every step of the way as I did before.
I promise you that there’ll be no declarations
of love this time around. You’re so obsessed
with the lens, with the camera. You’re in love
with everybody, that’s your kind of education,
your kind of hardworking-philosophy. You
say that you love her, so love her like family,
your mother. One word from you, one false alarm,
changed everything about our past. Old friend,
so, this is goodbye. This time next year you’ll be
married, and I’ll never hear from you again.
I pray that you’ll have poetry in your life, stories,
narratives, concepts, reminders of concepts, life
in perspective, in context, sipping on Saint
America’s supernatural provision, and words take
on a life of their own. Let your wife shop for
clothes, and when she’s pregnant let her shop for
maternity-wear, your hands will drift across
the waterfall of her dark hair. The path you have
to go is ecstasy, touch her restless soul, and then
let her touch yours, wonder boy, genius boy,
You’re Zambia, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and the
Ivory Coast. You only win when you hear her talk
in her sleep. There’s a shore she has to reach to
get to you, whenever you close your eyes. Your
sea is beautiful this time of year, the origin of
your universe, baby galaxies are at rest, space
is expanding back into time closer, closer.
It contracts to a certain point, and returns to time,
energy and matter. The flesh is just the absolute
beginning of your life, your love’s tragedy,
illustrations of science.You will be most thorough
when it comes to your love. I was all wrong for you
from the start, could never make you happy, my emotional
damages would have become your emotional
damages, at night I sleep with Alba at my side, and
you sleep like the gospel, the spiritual racing
through all of your nocturnal molecules holding
the knock, search and obey through faith and action,
my old love. Faith is risk not yet seen, a standing
conviction of things not seen. I was saved through
your grace, the mask that you use, the taste of
red, red wine. You did not choose me after all.
I have Robert Lowell, Paris, and all this madness war.
Explicit Literary Journal 