List Before We Die
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: November 18, 2003

VARITATION ONE

You remind me a man who women give themselves to. Who leaves them at dark with only such precious naked memory, and they run to collect fragments of verse that litter the trail you travel. Dirt road is black, full of orchids only you can see. If Jesus planted an orchid I would want it to wilt in the buttonhole of your wool sweater. Petals floating away, like littering verse, toward the blur of your feet. I die white like orchids buds. You die wrapped in your sweater because you choose to stop running.

VARITATION TWO

We are not heroes by strict definition. Real heroes never die and therefore are not our kind of heroes. Perhaps only because there is no one brave enough to write them an ending worthy of their heroics. Weakness is our beauty. Our opposing foe not a mighty king plotting grand and towering murder, but the broken glass on the sidewalk, the question love, the darkness of the night to come. We are not heroes. We are not noble. You die on a throne of cold dirt covered by a blanket that you wove. I die jumping off the Argo.

VARIATION THREE

You die once. I die paranoid that I am not really dead.