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Echolocation

Put in ear buds to bloom elsewhere. / Elsewhere, I am already a father.

Poetry | Poetry Tuesday
May 25, 2021

Put in ear buds to bloom elsewhere.
Elsewhere, I am already a father.
My father has done nothing
wrong. I say this to hate myself.
Speaking is never how I tell.
I prefer becoming rope. That which
writhes into the night: becoming.
The night never held me a lullaby.
I had to learn to lull my body into good
but my body never leaned good for its own sake.
The sake I drank in Toronto held me over
the dead bodies of my ancestors. Forsaken,
I moved my legs toward home like metal chopsticks
in the palm of a baby. My baby doesn’t walk
this Earth yet; I rarely hear why it should.
I am afraid of the day I’ll only be able to hear.
My hearing, too, fades into fear. In the city
in which I love too many people,
love becomes a different sense:
a sense by which I navigate the map
to the soul of my father. As I hang
soulless, low and beholden, the rope
part of me thinks, better to be lullaby
than a flower blooming into nothing, into
my body. I am here. I have said this before.