To the Memory of Che Guevara

For the aging stock boy in a store in Havana,
he cleansed the ordinary from a pedestrian life.
For the spinster who stitched emotions in Cordoba,
he visited her nightly in her simple room.

In the middle of our darkest nights, my friend Holmes said,
we know our true selves. We sit face-to-face with our truth.
I disagreed. People know more about celebrities than family.
Step away from that mirror, keep a photograph of me.

That night, could we have met in a coffee shop, my love?
Could I have been a different man? I did not walk away.
I marched toward you, but with a different aim.
I wanted to be a man with one name, an image hovering over a continent!

Che was taken in by a lavender breeze of gunsmoke and war cries.
The clouds of turmoil keep the soul close to the ground,
until it slips away before the primal mind is cleared like grain.
The movement of bodies through a landscape kindles a man’s heart,
leading inevitably to the question: what if we only did this?
I have had the same feeling watching war movies on late night tv.

Those nights were defined by her darting, black eyes, and the rough
skin of her hands. She cradled my rumbling head. I grew strong in that pose,
like a knight, two frozen like an armored pieta, until, in a moment of feeling,
I stood and walked away, a soldier until the end, until the final Bolivian clearing.

I flew over your mountains, your forests and rivers. Liberated from mortal clay;
killed for a concept. My spirit worked overtime to understand who and what
were these people who looked to an icon for hope. Now, I walk unnoticed here,
in Chicago, trying, as I go, to match sounds and rhythms to the tragedies we face.

Did they ask me to do this? I could not remember.
My mind, in the twilight, was lost in an obstinate dream.