We met in Berlin in black and white.
Or was it at four years old as we stood in a circle and sung to you.
Your tune was always lilting, but the words were like percussion,
Sounding without meaning.
I met you, not knowing you would become my home.
And here you are, with your stumbles and falls,
Tongue twisting into unknown forms.
I open my mouth to interject but you’ve moved on.
In shouts I meet you,
Like the bull and its red cloth, dancing.
I sit on the bank of knowing you.
We meet in the way skin brushes when one shakes hands,
But not in the sweaty heat of lust sodden sheets.
You are a foreign language that has become familiar to taste,
The German language, softened by a southern tongue.
Let me unwind the wire that binds you up tight, suffocating.
You complicate when all I want is to take my skin and turn it inside out.
I want to show you who’s dancing, laughing, singing without you.
You weave a whole country together, but I also live between your hills.
I am braver than your repetitive grammar,
I can speak you.
I am in love with one of yours and she leads me,
Through your snake scales, to pull apart the spaces, the endings, the judgment.
I am not without you, we have become kin.
A festival of light fills my chest, as the singing begins.
A deep hum not unlike bees.
You sit beside my English mother,
Language in me.
