I earned a degree quoting the many thoughts of Shakespeare,Marlowe, Elliot, etc. Every night, my head bent at the readingtable where the lamp light licks my eyes into an itch, an epitaphechoing in my mind because I thought books were going to bethe destrier that’d gallop me to my slaughter. In my other life,I am a boy, and what do I know except to run alongside the otherboys, bare skin, leaf-pants. Our bodies wet from the river’svery spittle. I climb trees, learn the dialects of leopards, sleepwith birds cooing by my bedside. In that other life, a boy my agewho has my face slits my wrist and what gushes out is gold, and wearen’t surprised. In our lexicon, there is no word for force, kill, bite,etc. The closest word to violence is forty syllables long. In mycurrent life, I’m an ellipsis —a thread traveling in the tendon of adead animal. I wake up every night amid bones clacking thendistilling into ash. In this life, I’m 23, sober, jobless, have dreamswhere I stand before students who’d never hesitate to laugh athow I pronounce their fathers’ fathers’ names. I write poems whereI am either an arrow or the body that suffers its violence. In thatlife, my other life, I soliloquize into shells, and my God eavesdrops,laughs, advises me to be a comedian. The angels nod, agree withHim. I’m a bridge and a boon. I build lives out of ligaments. My clanputs me on a camel to save a dying continent. I am neither a lambnor a wolf. I am a tree at a river’s tongue, which means archangelsgather around me to assign duties to destinies. In my one true life,I search for joy. Colted by loss, paddled by ghosts of women whoplanted their names in my ribs before knowing the calm of coffins.In that other life, I am no one’s child, even joy begs to adopt me.