I want things I do not deserve.
how awful to be choked by your own
idle and uncertain hands? Maybe that
is the punishment: longing with no reciprocity.
it is impossible to know the dead the way
I need to–

so take me to Medina! I just want to taste
it for a moment, (what have I done to deserve that air?
not much, and whatever I have collected was blown
to bits the last time I opened my mouth and sang
my sad, sad song.) what do you do when the poverty you
face is your own making? no one can save you when you
grovel for a living / takemetoMedina / I just want to
cradle it, the sounds, the scent, the dirt (the same dust
for over a millennium). how can it ever be that the earth
could hold two such desperately different feet: those
of Humility, and…mine?

I wait for things that are not coming:
redemption, wholeness, the hug of a grandfather. nothing
is arriving (or tucked behind the horizon)
but I just don’t seem able to let it go.
take  me  to  Medina.
let me go. let me go and be gone and stand still for a
lifetime in the middle of the street, in the middle of the
courtyard, in the middle of a city blistered into holiness.

take my knees take my legs (the head! the heart!) take all
of me if I can just, get one inhale, one velvet inhale, in the city of Medina.