Dallas days, smoking in your acura legend,
your face veiled, watery eyes.
Tom, I asked you to teach me poetry.
You opened your dictionaries of devotion -
for me to run away, again.
Under a weeping willow, we dug a hole for a time capsule.
Our lives were small enough for this rusty lunchbox.
See, mine was never a kids’ drawing on the refrigerator,
but a western, a shoot-em-up.
Can you understand, just a little,
how it was home I was running towards?
And still, in strange places
I spoke your language of tenderness,
my extinct mother tongue. With words
so ordinary, so simple.

Those memories
                  the warmth of you
make it hard to imagine 
that you are buried somewhere in Iowa.

I revisited that cow pasture with our tree,
my hands clawing at the frozen earth to get time back.
Tom, you promised me poetry, yet all I can write is
please come back to me
in a hundred variations. How I long
to bargain your soul for mine.
Your little toy airplane, the one you gave me
when we were kids, still stands on my nightstand.
This time let me teach you
about the cruelty of freedom.