stories

This one is from Russ Ligtas - a gay schoolmate of mine. He's a pretty good poet.



Story

I’ve rewritten our letters
on my back

where I can’t read them,
anymore

your poetry
is everywhere in me

hidden from you
under skin, under flesh

in secret, your secrets
our secrets, in code

and I remain
the only cipher

If you come back
If you decide to decode me

we, forever, will be lost
in translation

our language is dead, my love
I have stopped sitting on its grave

Our scholars have given up
The story we told is forgotten

If you come back
if you decide to look for me

You will find
no painted heart on my back,

no tattooed poem
on my skin

no song to cocoon us
back into embrace

Unlike the letters
that spelled our love

or the forest of poems
we planted

our story cannot be
rewritten

our love cannot grow
in a garden of ash

Relic, I am
of our history

and when I disappear
when finally

finally, I crumble
into dust

you can scatter
the powder of me

knowing
and not knowing

which part is our story
and which part is me.