When They Realize
when they realize that life is a fight for it/ all of life is a fight for all of it/ or whatever rush of it they can get a hold of and grab/ all you need are fists/ when they realize that i have survived most of what they continue to endure and question like chasing the crows through a chilling sky/ they begin to regard me in another light/ this would not necessarily be the light of authority because i am not that/ when they begin to whisper to their lovers in a refusal to burn in their ravines/ and our summer hands drip with rain and blood/ when they can fathom that all of us are lucky to be alive at all/ and that i share with them the same luminous terrors that give them nightsweats/ it’s hard for them to put me inside the stereotyped box of homogenized echo/ back from brightness where the walls are tarnished with their fingers/ and their loneliness and my loneliness are of banishment unresolved/ the magnanimous cruelty of sleep you asked for it and married to the lake we dive into when no one can see you naked in the dark, and ragged blur remains your eyes, the fatal ships are wars we have fought together/ their wounds and mine are split between us/ butchered with the lights still on/