It Runs in the Family

like horses through the smoke
of a field on fire. We dance
in its light, which has surrounded

us since we were born & grown
in intensity ever since. My brothers
& I occupy separate bricks

on the same bridge: outside
the scripts we learnt in school
for ways that human thinking

blooms. Or should. Our neighbor
-hoods were laboratories,
their explosive effects embedded

in us, one might say, the way color
holds feeling. The basics of popular
Lockean dicta offer little to clarify

how I came to be here like this,
in this mind, upside
down. The doctor says

It runs in the family and doesn’t
explain. The war runs in
my father’s blood like arrows

through elk. Is that how you
mean? The prison runs in my
brother’s blood like language

through an era. There is a boy alone
in a room, at a desk, at the bottom
of a pile, and the words run through

his brain when he hears you speak,
like a mutiny unspooling. We arrive
in this life with so much already

inscribed. I sing to my son Careful
when he attempts to achieve liftoff.
Morrison’s children were shocked

to learn they couldn’t fly. As was I.