Placedness

by Djelloul Marbrook

I pass so many houses where I live with you,

so many cemeteries where I sleep with you

as if our lives had been a pastime and we

had been waiting for this freedom to choose.

Now that I walk slow to save my breath

I love you with all the imagination I

throw out with the garbage and the terrible

sundries of strings attached, in these wide

places in the roads, these Saturday shadow fairs,

these honors of the other, love you for our otherness,

our cockeyed definition of place, our placedness

where we to our delight do not belong.