In Another Country

I refuse memory.

I refuse family—

medicated calls and crisis,

the toll of fault and fatuous grievance.

I refuse the rage of roots—

of depression Georgia, orphan East Texas.

I refuse the reeling, beery wandering,

the hunched, whispered complaint

that is fatherhood, that is motherhood.

I resist dreaming.

Night thoughts are steel schools and decay,

humiliations,

loosed, wispy cries from the failed, the dead.

In refusal, in resistance,

I claim an empty street, the night hunter’s field

as room to move, to rise.