How do you kiss mouths where
Words are festering deprivation?

Because word upon word upon word
Can make a poem, but it cannot make a heart.

Because a heart swelling under an indifferent gaze
Is a prisoner of the bullet that grazed it.

Because I don’t feel a thing when a plant dies
As a prisoner held by an incomplete thought of patience.

Because a night contoured blue at the edges
Is going to die in a mine-infested water.

Because the most beautiful thing about love
Exists at the cusp of what it would be.

Because memory is not a carousel of absences
Tethered to a love that withered as an almost.

Because an almost is nothingness as a wound
Growing on you as a gaping expanse of all human frailties