I Wish to Hide Behind this Poem

I wish to hide behind this poem.

Lingua: What tongue can reveal?

Languere: How weak to say?

.

To say the mahogany cracks

beneath the worrying sun,

while a poor man treks

with baby at his chest,

the newborn’s mouth still searching

for what can't be done.

His friend holds out a yam.

Come back for milk, he says.

.

Home wavers in the heat

like a burning scroll,

read to a wife already underground.

He drops the pot.

He lights the fire.

Regress.

His hands know longing

long before his mind.

.

Mother.

Did she float down

a bloody, electrified river?

After she followed

the red light of her nakedness?

Or miscarry dreams

for gravity to flush?

Forsaken.

Keep saying that word.

In the crib—

Don’t find him there.

.
What the hell are you doing out there again?

she demands.

Dragon fruit on his tongue knows. 

To believe he is fiction is enough.

My dear, it doesn’t matter what you believe. 

Things are what they are.

Lost to the cold verisimilitude

of endings, then, he will always

be gone of himself.

In the underbelly of sleep,

he will continue to move

through the brackish waters,

hidden.

And gone.