To live by watch fires is no fate,
waiting for him always made sense
only when he was my escape,
anticipation became then

what was to take his place, this game
I’ve made since then of getting played
by men, every one of them
my father promising to come

and, same old story, only they
ever did, slain by my plague’s hymn,
this prayer of my body’s a taste
of a promise, dishonest then,

its wanting to give of salt pain
sweating inkblots of tears changed
to honey, trickling filaments
of energy lost love spent

with abandon as if this faint
memory can condone what sin
of his my own, more condemned, may
be by some even called common,

sons wanting not wanting betrayed
when, in our wandering, we stray
from seeming confident, fallen
from constellations, stars taken

out of equations once ablaze
sink, as my own has done, not in
an instant but across vast days,
beneath waves of oblivions

we who breathe language obfuscate
and occult with silences paced
to entice to seek behind them
what, in time, my words revive: him.