The Waiting

I see you as a boy. I see you standing near your father.

Looking at your father  needing your father  showing him that need.

This when now you do everything without him. This when he turns away when you reveal strategy.

This when your friends seek suggestion. You are a prince in a city without royalty.

A prince in a family where your father isn’t king. You have chosen your grandmother.

You see her facial tattoos as charms as symbols of more than marriage the people here forever.

Her teeth are gold crowns. In her house there is freedom  continuity unlike your parents’.

Even now you bring her water when she sleeps. The sea is so far from here but there are lakes  waterfalls.

The sea is near you now. Its crashing echoes throughout the apartment.

What new music is this? What is to be learned from it?

The Atlantic once again  perhaps there is more salt than water.

There are women who wait to be asked inside. Perhaps they are escaping fathers gone mute.

You have led them to the coast  to your apartment. The boy you once were still somewhere within water.

This is what those women see. Particularly what they see in eyes that glisten as if tigers’.

The boy waiting for his father to lay hand to shoulder. The father who hears of the knife at University.

The father who knows his son left during mayhem  windows in pieces.

The knife held by a man from Sahara then used to pierce him hollow.

This because a girl with hidden hair was pulled too close.

Red flags in the desert  peculiar red in a russet landscape.

The claim is peace yet they claim themselves as does another land.

Bandits wait in sunned  forsaken corners perhaps to disturb idleness.

Tiny groups roam heat  practice themselves among themselves.

But you don’t know this. Away from the disaster it caused in the capital.

It is the sea. Your father away from that sea.

He is on land in a house tiny  white  almost invisible. You wade as he waits inside.