Where he comes from,
the light folds in on itself,
looks like it's sleeping,
like it's not even there,
until it crashes into you,
knocks you over like you're just a person.

His father was a bricklayer.
That's where he learned the trade.
And by now the walls have grown too high
for him to reach over and climb.
Some days he spends with an ear glued to brick,
listening for voices on the other side,
and when he hears one, he tries to turn his hands
into sledgehammers
to smash through and prove he exists,
but they aren't sledgehammers, they're just fists,
and they bleed.

He knows the sound of the darkness whispering in his ear,
like a cinder block in a blender.
And he knows the feel of its hand on him,
the one that turns him arctic everytime.
And he knows how to crumple beneath it like paper.

In the mirror he sees eyes shaped like icebergs,
a smile sewn from steel.
He knows his heart,
it looks like a butcher shop.

But he told the can't man to fuck off for good,
I've had enough of your poison.
He says, "I'm not asking you to believe me,
I'm only asking you to listen."

There are acres of orchards planted on his spine,
and they ache like waitress feet,
those tree bodies reaching up
like arthritic hands trying to pray,
and bloody knees bleeding sunset colors.
The trees,
they grow,
from his back.
This man, he carries a forest with him.
It's as if he's standing underwater, the way he moves,
surrounded by brick,
and he thinks to himself
"if these walls could talk, they'd scream."

He tells me he knows he's gonna have a daughter someday,
so he carves inside his ribs now to slay the beasts that haunt him.
They are not from him, or of him,
but they are his to hold,
glued together from the pain of the lives that created him,
and he will not give his daughter to them.
"You cannot have her.
It ends with me.
It ends here."
And he screams it.

He knows if the moon didn't shine on these rooftops,
they would collapse upward.
And if his feet didn't move,
they would turn to grass beneath him.

He thinks of birds inside his shoulder blades.
And that sledgehammer inside his fist.

And he stands up against the flood.
And he swallows an ocean.
And he chews through a wall, brick by brick,
until he is just standing in the rain,
on a streetcorner, soaked through,
but still breathing,
and if he could stop laughing, he would cry,
cause he knows he has made it.

Cause where he comes from,
the light folds in on itself,
looks like it's not even there,
until it shines on you,
knocks you over,
like you're nothing
but a person.