Diaspora

Never before posted.  From hard copy files — maybe 1993, 1994?  I’d stopped obsessively dating every poem I wrote some years before that.  In terms of page numbers it’s roughly from the same time as poems from my first chapbook, “In The Place Of Definitions,” which was printed in 1994.

Pretty heavily revised.  The original kinda sucked.  Trust me.  This might too, of course.

they burst thru
my door
my body door and
my body opened into 
a vacant store

you stood in the torn way
and held the rain back
wiped the rain back from
the shaken wood and 
didn’t speak until

you said
together let’s forget 
a closure
that won’t come
let’s forget a false home

where we’d hang our misfortune over
the body door as a bad blessing
a wrong message a sad scroll
a temporary prompt
for an unsafe locale

violations were made
they are made whole again
when we
don’t rehang the broken door
instead we together make

a new
door and
until the next break
may we now call
this shelter home