He never asked me for anything.
His humbleness and fruitfulness grew on me
Without knowing that his hand could carve words into ellipticals and parabolas.
His cooking skills were awful,
but he can make a Ramen soup
That'll make your knees melt like overcooked chicken broth.
He was 24 when he first came to this country,
his English broken like the glass protecting his eyes,
He left African battlefields and deserts
To generate cereal boxes and lithium batteries.
His pockets stuffed w/ month-long receipts,
because he always wanted to keep track of where he spent his hard-earned money.
Nobody gave him a cup to **** in, much less a ***.
But he always felt optimism grow in his foreign lungs,
swinging his voice like a hammer to build maturity,
to stand like golden shrines.
He’d pray every night to speak to his lord,
to ask God to help shape him into something a bit more,
like his shoulders were too weak to bear the struggles of his cries.
He works harder than ghosts to keep his heart in this world.
The Beach Boys were his favorite band when he first came here,
and he always babbled about Brian Wilson because he wrote poems.
He searches for lost poems that he's buried inside the mother of his children
He visualizes the pages of these poems,
writing themselves on the faces of his children.
He tries not to see too long, too hard,
because then he may see too much of himself inside his oldest son.