to bury me

go without a compass until you find the clocktower.

"I don't want to know if I still have a home.
It's not home if it's all gone."


.    the university

he overheard in the laboratory that it would be another year.

extended semesters,
        he was thinking that maybe midnight is a misnomer, that
nothing is quite like the library at 2 AM,
 a study in silhouette of the shapes outside the window
            simply the statues of weeping angels
   standing guard over sufi tombs.

from sunrise to sunset, through daybreak and fireflies,
he studied neurology in an excerpt from
    the dream journal, writing a thesis on afterthoughts
and flower pots.



.    the soccer field

the foxgloves grew beneath a million jewels of sunlight.

students sprinting like dama gazelle,
hitting goals and grass stains
he admitted that there's delight in me that's
not yet dead.

  he recalled knotting his shoelaces
and stretching his joints, limbs, and spine
   after being curled around an ache in
         the examination room.

his classmates didn't realize the
  military was watching.



.    the market

friendly men and women, raising scents of silk and gunpowder.

they didn't have much. papercut portraits of
pop singers and dead poets,
and their shared brown eyes.

he learned within the institute that greeks
 were obsessed with law and order,
      terrified of eris and the moirai, and that death
hates personification but
       we give him feet and hands.

when the army took him, they handed him a rifle and a
dull knife for a misericorde.

a foreigner said something about the morgue,
     the medical tent, about mi cuerpo sin cicatrices.

whatever it meant, he knew the man would be dead soon.



.    the fireplace

upon returning home, the single room was too small.

        he spent days staring at the ridges
in the plaster ceiling, at the jasmine
   beginning to die on
the faded gleaming windowsill.

his younger brothers were poverty children,
  never knowing that playing in the streets and
saying morbid proverbs was
       the equivalent of callegrafía to a corporate facade

and they grew up in a westernized time,
where nothing sounds lyrical like it should and everything
echoes in these mirrorless halls.



.    the clocktower

the whole country was covered in rubble and rust.

he found their makeshift football goals collapsed,
   digitalis revisited he was greeted by
bruise-colored dripping,
          coal gray insect wings.

uncalled, he remembered the scientific name of
the red admiral, the painted lady, the
 mourning cloak in family nymphalidae.

a self-inflicted achromatic bearing the
green and white flag, he made a promise to
          his departed classmates that
       nothing would be able to bury me.

      in an email to his brothers and
  parents, last edited 11:11 in the timezone
          half a world away, he was told
the library is still full.
     he asked the cousins who never knew him
  if they can say you would have loved me.

the clocktower marks the center, the heart.

        does the structure have a name?
not in this story, because only the undefined
  are infinite.

maybe damaged, even wiped off the map,
but for some instants,
it is still home.



"The dusty crimson bricks still stand.
I can see the way to familiar horizons at last."