Babylon (for the same song) Come over and be the city. Not the porch light. Not the polite knock. Be the gate, the noise, the gardens nobody believes were real until they are standing in them, wrecked, barefoot, overdressed in wanting. I have been in exile all day long. Thinking about you the way a captive thinks about a road. I don’t know how I will get along out here in the ordinary dark, speaking a language even I don’t finish. So maybe you should just come over here and do me until the tongues mix, until the rant breaks into the only dialect that still works: hands, mouth, the low gold hum of not explaining. Babylon is the too-much. The wine on the counters of a rented kitchen. The way your coat hits the chair like a flag coming down. The commerce of it, honest for once: I have something starving, you have something burning, we spend it all and call the spending holy because it is not saved. Don’t bring me the ruins. Bring me the night before the ruins. Hang the gardens off the hallway. Let the empire be small enough to fit on a mattress and loud enough to drown the part of me that keeps rehearsing tomorrow. I know the city falls. I know the verse. I am not asking Babylon to last. I am asking it to take me in before I lie down in the street of my own head. And if nirvana comes, let it come as the minute after, when the empire goes quiet in your throat, when nobody is conquering anything, when the same song is just breath, and the exile, for a little while, forgets the way back. One night long. The tower, then the silence. Same song. Don’t translate it. Do it.
