Hey, you there man?

Hey, you there man? 

My mother said you could catch a bird by throwing salt over its tail
a lie, until we were fourteen under the Brooklyn Bridge with with our skateboards, a wax paper bag of nuts and way too much time.
We all caught one that day.
I caught two.

Hey, you there man?
2am, four years of nothing.
I know the shape of that question.

You won't show for dinner.
Won't text back.
But at 4:30 in the morning, after a long night of not getting along with the world,
A place we both know too well,
you always knew why to keep going

You are kind. Like kind. My kind.

I spent years in a room of men who kept their word like a closed fist
and you were there the whole time, somehow, in the walls, or the air between words
fighting a world that does everything to hold a man down.
Your eyes whispered that living truth doesnt feel like crushing bone

I left because you cannot force a bird to step into your hand.

I am, at once, in this spring morning listening again to your voicemail: the one who forgot the water boiling for ramen, who’s signing papers so a house becomes more mine and less mine, the one who’s overwhelmed at work, at life, and who with a closed fist holds me to

a calm unhurried voice
on my call back
neither eager nor hurt

no,

somewhere behind all of that,
even behind the anxious wondering of just how to do it right,
every fiber of me arranging, straining

asking how to hold my hand just right
for a dove to feel safe.