Love was always temporary,
quick, suspect with others
but then I met you.

You taught me how to sound it out,
how to count its syllables,
how to hold my pencil and write it.

I guess now I understand
why we are still on the first letter.

The nightly news suggested that my clan and friends
and poetry and me gather all of our things
and evacuate the city but because my folk
are people in the margin, people in financial

strain shaped by oppression, I have - instead - loaded things
and bodies into a single caravan and am
en route to you because you are smoother and longer
and stronger, taller than the tallest road in the world.

In my mind, you have become the road; a road whose peak
is 18,000 feet, a road whose place is between
the East and West, a road whose beginning has no end
and a road whose end has no beginning - none at all.

Heavy rain. Flood water. High wind, the weatherman said.
For years, I have been compelled to take this road, to ride
its curves with finesse, to drift in a single gear for
miles, to go and go and go on the smoothest road 'round.

For years, I have been compelled to take this road, to be
elevated at 18,000 feet - yes, to be
transported closer to heaven, to be and be and
be on the longest, strongest, tallest road in the world.

En route, an elderly man asked me, Why her, young man, why
her? I shifted gears. Accelerated up a hill
of you and said, Because she has exceeded all things.
Exceeded what, young man, exceeded what? Do tell. Do.

All other roads and passageways, the labyrinth of
life, everything, sir, everything.

And how do you know we will survive along this road?
he asked.

Because no matter the point of origin, so long
as we are on the road of her, there will be fields whose
crops are plenty - always in season, brooks whose water
never recoils, and rivers of milk that do not spoils.

Do not leave me
not even for a day.

For a day is long,
difficult to understand

and one without you
exhausts me.

By my life's end and lost poem
the world will be covered with you.

Your name and scent and actions
will be written and then scattered

upon pages and hearts and stones,
upon date-trees, grape-leaves, and palms

for centuries to come.

The world is unfolding inside of me
because your departure took
the east, the west, the north, the south,
the fall, the spring, the trees from me.

I have been chasing you
for so long
that I have scraped my knees
on the curb of eternity.

Love, if you are the
answer, could you have someone
repeat the question?

I wanted to write your name down in blood
over and over and over
on slabs of gold and stone
but you prefer to be left alone.

I wanted to build a monument of your face
to overlook your land, your tribes, your home
but you prefer to be left alone.

Instead, I wrote your name on lavender sands,
your birth date on the golden change of winds,
my love for you on the sunset over the Indian Ocean.

I wrote everything for you
on places of scatter
and on places of dissolve.

I wanted to leave your mark on the world
but realized the irony in such
because you are already aligned
with the rising sun and setting moon,
you are already an endless cycle of life and death.

Still, I want to write you down in history
but you don't want to leave your mark on the world,
you don't want your coming and going announced.

To leave my mark on the world,
you said,
I would first have to injure it,
disturb the status quo,
but I would rather be left alone.