Beware, the elder told me,
everyone gets what they ask for. God gets the earth. Adam gets Eve. Eve gets out of the garden. True believers get inside the meanings of dark songs. But be careful. What you hunger for might fill you up, might make you high, might take you out. And what you got then? I said: I can’t complain. I got a Companion of Light’s favor. This sunrise. This midseason’s warm air to walk toward what my life’s trying to tell me. I got an insomniac city’s proximity and a mask for the coughs on its trains. It’s got new station maps. Blue cyborgian light. And sings me the blues through a pair of earbuds, of which only the left one works. When my noise-canceling died, I got to immerse in my environment. The kid in me bent toward the dust and spittle of its lore. I got me. I’m like anyone else. Like this tattooed alpha bro craning his neck, watching himself in the window’s reflection. I want to see myself. But the elder says Be careful what you ask for. And I say: Maybe there’s nothing but asking. Maybe to be is nothing but to wish. Like this boy, gilded in pubescent throes, straining for nonchalance beside a woman whose soft interest in an elder’s veiny hands floats though a forest of sorrows before appearing on her face. I wanted to sit alone today but something in me must’ve known better. Must have cast a vote for this sun through the window, shining at this angle in this trembling car, creeping through the air by the East River’s gleaming waters. All breath swooning from the witness of this beauty must have asked to be swallowed and, swollen, waking from the fever dream of Being, into these limits. Something in us must have yearned for these curiosities, these questions like letters accumulating at a kidnapper’s gate. Open one and we might get an old word: All notes in this composition are haptic spasms pretending atomic, animal pretending animuses. Must meaning flatten to these particular colors if it yearns to be real? I raise the question as I raise my hand, as you raise a flag, as the board raises their funds. As my mother raised me: barrels aimed at our heads, bared yellowed teeth under gazes stripping us, promising to swallow us again. I sigh. My stop’s coming up, so I ask what’s really burning me: What does it matter? The elder replies You tell me. Is any word sayable? Is any change simple? Ain’t no end. How deep you think you have to dig to uproot a plantation? How much deeper to unearth a world?
