Love    or the making of it      is not much

            Of a private affair for us         as are road trips…

           Outside the suburban                  future forests & trees whip

Lash back into past dreams                  to photosynthesize

                      Same way our shadows would always

Grow towards our country no matter our fleeing speed

We made it baby     we made the city weep as we pushed

           Out of it        then to prove how love poems—waiting

To happen—can surface in damasks of dust & dirges   we trapped

The bloodthirsty city in the rearview                  looking too bashful

           To be a war approaching      another country…

God tell me   it was for nothing but desire

            It was for the hunger your hands became namesake

To the masturbator’s                       not the salvager’s

           Tell me you built us in your likeness knowing you’ll not last…

We never hoped you’d be the debt we passed through to get here

            Just the illusion of rain receding through a trench of cadaver clouds

           Give us this day        to number the rest of our days

With no telling the bodies       & lengths     we’ve forgiven

                       To be screams timeproof in a landscape

Skeletoned with bloodied daggers     & talkative guns…

God     we never wanted to be       the love story

                       In the odyssey         just the lost seafaring

Vast between it         like longing