Persecution

I. I've never seen your eyes so dark,
so obsolete, like hope had gone out of style,
out of your European cookbooks.
Searching out those who want to make
lampshades out of your yellowed, tattooed skin.
Your voice cracks my heart into pieces
at the trembles of genocide on your breath, low
and mournful.
A broken piano
or hushed hymns spoken through a
funnel of doubts.
Your movement is like a clock, ticking frantically,
tasting the smell of blood on your lips, feeling the winter
eat you.
Germany lies tangled beneath your tongue,
smelling of piss and vomit and gas and disease,
onions stolen out of graves.
Since when did eyes betray one to the wolves?
Time deludes your name into sunken sand, your bones
whittled away in the fear of being alive
here.
Your captors act under orders, but they are
the Devil, too,
and you wish to spit between their organs
as the sound of Munich burning rings
like Heaven in your teeth, like blood and sand.
We are the same, built from Passion.
Passion for life.
And Passion for death.

II. Your face betrays your heartbreak,
but your age is ambiguous
even in your eyes, in clouds of loneliness,
even as you see years melt away
and your family slip through your fingers,
led away into the forest by your
estranged Love.
Your identity is inverted, again and again,
to lonely college student to lonely lover,
to lonely aging man.
Gray shimmers and wriggles into your Jewish hair, and
lines cut themselves, like Hitler's scars, into your jawline.
How do you hide? In backwards
tongues or chalk dust?
Or the way ink spreads across the
tips of your gnarled fingers, like blue rivers of
exaggerated tears?
"This is here and now," you say as you
can't seem to tear yourself away from
the broken promises she holds out to
you, like grain to a
pigeon.