Bitter Boys

Whose own mother left them

three years ago, whose father cares for them now

though barely, it is said, always ill-fitting

school uniforms and dirty casual clothes,

who do no sports, and owning nothing

are impossible to punish.

The school and the suburb knows it.

Too young for banishment they must

be accommodated yet might run amok,

say we couldn't help ourselves,

mutilation's in our blood.

How could they, motherless, ever know

which versions of themselves should

take precedence? How could they learn

to want what it is possible to have?

In the rain my mother drives me to school but

there they are at the bus stop, moping

in regulation school-gray rain jackets.

A lift can't be offered, consider their likely wetness

and their intractable

group lumpiness, the three of them

dripping there in the backseats,

struggling with seat belts

and where to put their bags,

and the dank smell of them in the tight car.

Would they speak in unison, like angels?

Would they have a chosen speaker, and if so

would they confer before responding?

In whispers or by silent looks?

Or would they speak independently in strange grunts,

produce a chaotic babble that

could not be quieted?

It is inexplicable, how they keep to themselves,

how quietly they play, serious

and strong-shouldered and ineffectual as birds,

even now by the canal, as though unobserved,

unhated, as though they will not die of bullets and

fast moving cars and needles

in rooms in other cities, scattered,

die of their own sheer unbelonging

the way I would if I were them.

Source: In a Language That You Know (University of Nebraska Press, 2017)