You’re in love with the radiowave wasteland,

(still ripe, resonant mind;)

And you’ve lost your years there all your life.

(but you win your time.)

Somehow I never see you in the radiowave wasteland—

All I do is catch the sleeves of your friends,
murky in the cenotes, underwater echoing

<where? where?>

They argue with each other,
pretending like you to be some sort of detective, I am
always behind.

You shuffle around in the radiowave wasteland,
and you wish on and watch and worship
your washed-out boulders.

I find the deep lodges of your steps
where you trudge—trip over your tracings
of the rocky borders already drawn.

(you always fall.)

sometimes I grow impatient and peel back the eyes of storybooks to see you; beside the looming monoliths and lime-diseased moors,
you’re always in the picturebooks, beginnings, poured in Lethe rivers.

(you rush and wring with them,
weaving into watery fibers
that resemble a soul?)

would you ever want to remember?
that curious vitality—
that redoutable hope
now presented so sparingly,
a breathe smoke over the radiowave wasteland

(your ghost’s lungs and ghost thoughts)

It’s true that you cannot remember the sound
of your own voice.

So I write you letters that tell you:
You had a brother, who showed you uranium, polonium
on Christmas morning in Sante Fe;

You love them
Because the radioactive wasteland arranged them into an array

(your lovely ash bouquet.)

Spikes and sulfur-air, streams so sweet and sweltering—you’ve grown, over the years, so darling, so pretty

awful, at remembering
that you are
in the radiowave wasteland.

So from someone else you always answer.