Footnotes
Always out of context
No culture, no country to my name
Drifting in the Great Atlantic
I half-have a family
Twelve hours away by plane
Where I can eat funereal sorrel soup
In a widowed, empty kitchen
With my bloodline of secretive
Stern loneliness and rations
Of love spread over time
With heavy hands and heavy words
History and houses destroyed
To keep up with the changing
Fashions as dictated
By era and by state
Presented here, more footnotes:
Out in the country of this current country
A thousand miles away
From common sense
I deciphered accents, discovered
Heavy eyeliner and my friends'
Mothers' lortabs and vodka on
an empty stomach
And the parallel,
empty rooms and doctrines of
Machines and empty shells that
We never called a cult
That broke me, nevertheless.
More context, then, the good:
Years of my second love, the road
Tent fabric straining, humid air
The Gambel oaks,
The desert, Texas, Arizona
The bare
necessity of home
At least they did not ask me
Where I'm from
As they do now.
And faced with crowds and neighbours
Since I have settled down
I try to speak and hold my hands
Like theirs, to hit the hidden signals
To know the movies, music, understand
Their context, and my own
They've known each other
Or someone similar enough
From birth and home, and I, I stutter
When they look at me
And wait for me to pass as something
Local
And I cannot show them
The everywhere I've been and am
The vocal changes
Between my
Current and native tongues
And the only constant I can find
Among these separate lives
Spanning two continents
What I have made and
Left behind, I carry
Like a passport, invisible
Closely held and guarded--
The only context that I have
Is me
Nothing and no one else.
