For You Are My Country

You have become a nation

And i need a passport to enter

your customs officers speaking only

in shrugged shoulders & the particular silence

that tastes like copper coins

& unfinished arguments

i am learning the language of a careful dance,

how to step around the landmines

you’ve planted in ordinary conversations,

each word a potential detonation

in the beautiful minefield

of trying to love someone

who flinches at the sound

of his own name

your heart has become a museum

Only after hours, when all the exhibits

Stand covered in white sheets

& i press my palms against windows

trying to remember what your laugh

looked like before it went extinct,

before the curators of your mind

decided joy was too dangerous

for this public viewing

we are two planets

orbiting the same gravity well

but never touching, your trajectory

a careful equation of avoidance

while i burn fuel trying to match

your elliptical pattern

this impossible dance around

shared bedsheets & the mysterious aches

that lives between what i want to say

  & what might shatter you

guilt grows like ivy through my chest,

roots threading between ribs

until i cannot work out 

where your pain ends

& my helplessness begins

we have become conjoined twins of sorrow,

sharing the same poisoned bloodstream

& i am drowning in the shallow end

of conversations that never quite

reach the depth where healing lives

some mornings you sleepwalk

through the kitchen like a ghost

making toast for a body

that forgot how to taste sweetness,

& i want to shake you back

into the universe of yourself

but i’m afraid you might crumble

like an ancient manuscript

in my desperate archaeology

because loving you has become

a careful excavation,

digging through layers of who you were:

the way you floated off dreams in showers,

how you threw your head down

when something struck you as so funny,

the particular blue your eyes turned

in that slanted evening light

before the museum closed

but tomorrow i will still tuck

small rebellions under your pillow

origami hearts folded from self help books,

tea made exactly how you liked it

before taste became another casualty

of the war inside your beautiful head,

still believing your borders

might open again, that somewhere

in the locked vault of your chest

your heart is just hibernating,

waiting for the right season

to remember how to bloom

in the strange acoustics

of being human together.