just a gambler at heart

The brick front outside my window | is unraveled like a fault line crawled up its spine | and now that the sugar maple shed all its | squirming starfish leaves, | they crawl and shimmy | in the puddles between | the stones, looking
for
their
missing
legs.

they gon’ put you out on the streets lorena | they gonna sing and dance upon your grave

sassy DJ flirting disasters. realizing that i am the owner of a marshallese heart. samantha power on the subway. electric dreams [it’s weird how much i miss you sometimes]. being restless and uneasy because i can’t find a coffee shop; i might have found a coffee shop...the potter's house. rosemary & garlic mashed potatoes + gin & mango juice = thanksgiving dinner. yumberry grapefruit yogurt. trans-atlantic african phone calls. the OC season four, and all the music that came with it. tutoring for t.i. and speaking espanol with carlos. dangerous almost missed messages.

k'naan. jambo. wander.
winter doesn't know where i been. neither do you, and it makes me want to break through the walls. speak it all out loud, every word. every night time minute under those goddamned stars, the songs that stuck to the underside of the pandanus leaves, the intense sense of melancholy that comes over a person when we begin to embody an island. how every breath was hot and crowded and why i never quite recovered from kabul's and that i carried it half way across the world and how angry it still makes me to know that. tension mounts when i hear howling from the walls, the ceiling, around a corner, and the fucker about that is really knowing she's still there being smashed against the window pane. my bones ached in fever for 3 hundred and twenty-four days and NOW. now they don't know how to be warm anymore.
i don't know how, anymore.
i am still underneath that tin roof, rain drumming a ruckus out and the hermit crabs crawling in the walls, looking for someone who was ready to leave and never did. the island ate me up it loved me so. the chorus rises up when i walk around in the dark, but no one is going anywhere together, no one is going to sing. we move [night moves] for different reasons here.

and i miss my friend.

i miss the baby and kuuj jidikdik and wotje and how he went spearfishing for us even though he still needs help with algebra. drinking shitty coffee in the sun. dancing at adma's. kejanjan ukulele. riding the beachcruiser to the airport in a rain storm. memorizing the bends in the road [this is what i miss of everywhere i've ever been]. what worries me, you see, is that i will make sense to no one no how never will now that this has taken part of my soul and changed it. i was and now i am something else.



but that sea is just a gambler at heart | tossed aside the weary