It’s all lacquer, spackle
off the tongue, spitshine words,
watch them become reflections of something
far from themselves. Do you feel me? I’m asking
what you do when it isn’t what it is.
When language is a buzzard drunk
on your rum. Your mouth
a workhorse chasing rancid
into tourmaline and sordid to the sun.
Call your fig a fig, trough a trough, call
your own name just to marvel
at whatever else might come, but what
will you call your chicken thicket? I’m asking
what you do when you have spoken
the cell that you’re speaking from,
claiming it isn’t what it is with conviction. Do you feel
afflicted by the looking glass,
razed by its perception?

I was asking
about Partition. We were sharing
tepid ranch water, brackish Houston night beckoned
a story that didn’t belong to him
in a city that belonged to neither of us. We were ears 
up to the phone, his mother’s
memory recorded for five minutes of communion
flickering tender like a cat’s eye. We could have been nothing
more than two flies on the brim of the zapper,
but every history starts as microcosm, and I was wondering
what I would remember—the story, the telling? What it would be,
what it was. How many forgets
to be reborn. All the ways to bastardize yourself
in italics! Foreign as an after-dinner mint. I didn’t want
to be literary; I wanted to be literal. Bloodstains
be bloodstains, blood be blood. I was trying
the old country on my tongue and spitting it back,
refusing what syllables could do us justice. I felt
squawks at the edges
of axons, begging form.