Epitaphs and Epiphanies

It's a thick, ethnic heat.
Concrete jungle
writhing beasts
swollen breasts
through beats of sidestreet hip-hop
torn up dreams scatter
bitter Main
and cradling
the boy you once were.
How you looked to the sky
treading hope and America
under your foot
and grace.
not so soon forgotten
not so written in epitaph.

Those graves were ancient we passed
When you sang me German
still as children of a broken state
our fathers' old frontier
and you would dream and dream
and whisper to me
the terrible secrets under the pavement.

Still so soon
there was you
and I as spectres
in a haunted city
growing up not quite as dead
as the addicts on Hamilton st.
The smell of sewage rising from the pavement cracks
and you wrote to me on bitter paper coffee napkins
I think I'm gay

I think I can't breathe
so just hold me, okay?
Watching the river colored from city lights
we can still cry
and dream and dream and dream
like we were children again.
Your eyes were photographs then
Your hands were from clay.
Just holding on the pavement
clawing what's beneath.

Treading water
I hold you hostage in my heart
before that spirit floats onto Nirvana
and becomes the little boy
I pretend is you,
living in our house now
spreading his toys along the windows you made love to
playing with trucks along the pavement
where beneath
your spirit lays.

-Music in Regine, 2007