by Ryan Di Francesco
I am sleeping
on a carpet of flowers
wondering how to love this world
in a wilderness
of tears and tenderness
of the loved and loveless,
of addicts and winners,
of gutters and gardens,
of smoothies and suicides,
of flesh butchered and torn—
with the rich on three-week
vacations in Florence
with the poor still sleeping
on cold concrete plazas.
Like sparrows eating worms,
eating apples,
rotting in the dirt.
Like you and me one day.
I am here still
wondering how to love this world
of mad ambition,
of uninformed progress,
of paring fingernails
and eating mutilated meat
wrapped up,
passed through
drive-thru windows,
devouring fractured words,
eating love.
Eating what Lorca knew.
I am sleeping
on a carpet of flowers
wondering how to love this world
with its images
of white chickens
and rotten plums in the ice box
still dreaming
at the edge of the cliff
while the flies feast
where the sunsets ended
in long and unknown streets.
This is just to say.
Love ate the idea in things.
Like it ate Hemingway
on a Sunday morning in 1961.
Like it is eating us today.
Love ate Rimbaud
and all the wild horses
and I
I am
still
sleeping
on a carpet of flowers
wondering how to love this world.
But I can’t.
Ryan Di Francesco is a Canadian writer and teacher. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Shadow and Sax, an emerging literary magazine, where his poetry and short fiction have appeared. His debut chapbook, The Paper Hound, is forthcoming from Alien Buddha Press. His poems and stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Toronto Star, The Pit Periodical, Ink in Thirds, Bicoastal Review, Bitter Melon, Rawhead, SHINE Quarterly, SQUID Magazine, Azarão lit journal, The Orange Rose, The Amphibian, The Page Gallery, and more. He also co-wrote the indie film Streets of Wonderland, which won multiple festival awards.
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