For the City that Nearly Broke Me

Knots like two dozen fists swayed with want from the boy’s kaffiyeh, that black and white scarf with its useless hands clopping against the wind in protest against this boy and his somebody lost, against their own swaying in a dance the lost body has lost. A boy. A somebody lost. A body bodied in the lights of inauguration night when every light in the city flared with hope. Always losing, always a boy left with a dozen weights, small circles on strings pulling his head down to the ground. Downcast. Drop your bucket here and make the city yours and all that jive keeps him from running. Escaping the pavement, where bodies finally fall to rest. The kaffiyeh keeps him from bucking against the wind, hurtling himself to the Grey- hound or Amtrak or I -95 with a book bag and hitched finger. His head shrouded in the black and white, the knots keeping his eyes down as he traverses neighborhoods with names like 3rd World, with names like a nation falling. And the coffin-voiced boy is who god tells us he will save, and so those swinging knots must be a kind of redemption, a way to see the bullets that bury you, constantly, as if death is the disguise hiding your wings.