the boy you love as much as you can grins &
looks a little to left of you, holding the insides
of a man we've never met in both hands & saying
yo dude this shit is whack & you wholeheartedly agree,
open your eyes the next day to his hand and nothing else
fingers still clenching and unclenching on
every misfired word; a fish
gasping for water, just a drop all the dead kids kneeling
at the cracked earth & saying please only a drop it's been so long
since we've had anything real
& i haven't had a drop of anything that didn't taste
like the mud scraped off another boy's back since
my mother turned to a garden in a country
we're still running from.