AMIT MAJMUDAR
Love Song for Doomed Youth
We weren’t born to live
long among the cracked
homes and crack
houses of the real.
The basketball court
fault lines smoke
with dandelion clocks,
something volcanic
in this city’s decay.
Car alarms sing
across widowed lots,
and in rushes the sea.
Baby, be good to me.
We weren’t born to live
long drinking the tapwater
zinc, the expired
milk of the real.
We must grow our hearts up
in this hothouse
of broken windows
because our bodies
have grown up by themselves.
The vets nest
in the hollows of buildings,
and in rushes the sea.
Baby, be good to me.
166 The Paris-American
We weren’t born to live
long among the cracked
homes and crack
houses of the real.
The basketball court
fault lines smoke
with dandelion clocks,
something volcanic
in this city’s decay.
Car alarms sing
across widowed lots,
and in rushes the sea.
Baby, be good to me.
We weren’t born to live
long drinking the tapwater
zinc, the expired
milk of the real.
We must grow our hearts up
in this hothouse
of broken windows
because our bodies
have grown up by themselves.
The vets nest
in the hollows of buildings,
and in rushes the sea.
Baby, be good to me.
166 The Paris-American
Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work has appeared, among other places, in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the 11th edition of the Norton Introduction to Literature, and The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-2012. His novels are Partitions (2011) and The Abundance (2013), and his poetry collections are 0’, 0’ (2009) and Heaven and Earth (2011), which won the Donald Justice Prize. See www.amitmajmudar.com for more details.