The World Is Too Full to Talk About

Lust for Life
My lust for life is modest
you and I, cigarettes and coffee
no fear.
dreaming and plotting for some sort of liberation
for workers never dizzy with the horror
of their children’s hunger.
of the inborn, later stolen, human dignity
restored.
* * * * * * * * *
it took me some years
not many but some,
to understand the size of life
it fits on my bed, naps after work, the essence of living
it fits on a bench with a friend smoking a cigarette on a day swallowed by rain
listening to a song, 500 years old, still sung the same way
it fits in my lunch plate, filled with rice, vegetables, potatoes.
it fits inside this dead man’s dizzying harrowing book of poetry,
the continuous horrors of his home, the barefoot children, his pregnant wife, his
failing lungs
poems I read alone at night, there is life.
* * * * * * * * * *
I am born and I will die in a place not made for laughter or growth
a place whose building blocks is anger and a hatred of the skin
and always I thought I had to wait, life was too large for this body and this city
it took me some years to see the commonness, banality of life
and when I finally realised I had loved you in the most private way
I understood the size of life. a song and your face for a week. You cannot ask
for more.
all things are passing and small. you cannot ask for more.
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