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so I try to touch back.
With two hands outstretched,
I look like a pervert.
Poetry wriggles away
from soiled, fetid palms.
I skip after it
whistling
with a nosebleed
as it escapes into the masses.
Korean people stand
with arms hooked
like a game of red rover red rover
poetry come over
so I can touch the lines
of your weather-worn face.
The elderly woman from a countryside village
outside Tongyong City,
94 years old,
a tiny bundle of sticks,
gray eyes, fragile smile pointed at me,
the first black man
she had ever met.
She never learned to read
or write, but she held out that smile
like a bouquet of cosmos flowers.
She said she never dreamed
because dreams did not exist
when she was a child—
to be a doctor or a teacher,
a business owner,
when Confucius had already prepared
a table before us? These “dreams”
were new things, weren’t they?
They must be an invention,
those dreams, engineered
by Samsung or Hyundai Motors.
The poor translation
of her words
shakes me awake.
Rising in a wail like an infant
with a wet diaper,
my soul.
A train car worth of witnesses—
my wailings fill wall to wall.
Pick me up
with a harness
and invisible pulleys,
pull me through
each day, my Lord,
carry me
and I promise
I will sing for you.