You live on another planet

we’ve only met once but sometimes I still feel

your warm, wrinkled, welcoming hand stroking my cheek.

When you called me on the phone for the first time in years

you spoke to me in hieroglyphics and symbols I couldn’t decipher

and I wanted to tell you that I missed you and

I hope you were doing okay in the hospital and

I wanted to see you but

I sat silent sitting sinking under the current of unspoken words

a stutter, a stammer

a silence.

A silence interrupted by a sound over the signal I couldn’t seize

a silence left sorry and stiff in the vacuum of my heart

a click of the phone and a silence made eternal.

A reaching hand smacked away by a barrier of language

sounds tucked away, never spoken

only to be amalgamated into an orchestra of oblivion.

We are linked by ancestry whose blood tastes bitter and foreign

for you are but an anonymous artifact left for me to excavate

but my tools are long rusted by the tears of my frustration

in trying to communicate to an alien

who lives on another planet.