September a week in

& I reek of nostalgia: balconies with rubber plants and ecstasy trips,

backseats, cold showers, Halloween in a shredded dress. They're

all the same man at this point and we're no closer to God.

They get married, have daughters, lose their hair.

Nothing will wreck your life like wanting something

that isn't in it. Or was it getting it. I'm trying to be enough

for this body: one heartbeat, flung like a shovel into the day.

I play Nadia's voice message blessing me with a son, but

it's autumn again and I'm bleeding with the moon. I want

to lay in her lap like a bouquet of flowers, but this isn't the time

for rhetoric. I'm crossing traffic in my dreams. I'm watching

a coyote watch my grandmother. It's been seven years:

molecularly we have regenerated. I love what I love, but I'm

still shedding leaves from my hair on a Beirut street,

I'm walking into the past with unlaced boots and gasoline,

& if nobody stops me, I'll rummage up the old numbers,

uncork lipstick, leave a trainwreck of cities and wives behind me.