Today you really could have just killed your boss, 

could have let him feel your words of razor-fanged 

truth slice at him, cut through the stitching of his thick, 

unused work-jeans and scar the skin on his knee caps 

so that every time he bent down for the rest of his life, 

he would curse your name.

But you didn’t. You stayed hunched in the salt of the sun, 

cooking like onions, secreting oils you didn’t know you had 

while you listened to Carlos and his prayers of calm 

as he muttered to you in a language you haven’t spoken since the tenth grade.

You thought of how the rolls of Carlos’ Spanish Rs reminded you of 

the rolling hills of your youth, and how hatred for any unkind patròn 

was one bubble in the grand boiling of time.

Carlos guided your calloused, tired arms

―your muscles soundlessly stuttering―

as blocks of cement tiles got laid into the dug up front lawn. 

Small holy-stones to build the stairway to this suburban front door 

on a home that looks like any other home in all of America.

But Carlos worked you marrowless with his faith in you―

his brown magnitude kissed with triumph 

as every twenty pound stone got laid into the earth 

with the respect of a fallen brother, 

and how each rock was consecrated through the action of its placement, 

and though you’d never believed in Him before, 

you swore you felt Jesus there with you, as long as Carlos, 

with the dark eyes of the universe, beckoned you onward.

“But onward to what?” You questioned as the boss cackled, unwet on the phone. 

You see because of Carlos, as he placed another reliquary into the earth, 

that it is permanence which you crawled towards in the heavy tongue of August, 

sweating so fiercely your fingers left prints on the cement. 

This stairway, in its small holy masses, through the worship of each patterned stone, 

became the only thing you’ve created that could outlast you, 

and though you’ve searched for decades for the perfect words to be remembered by, 

it is through Carlos’s tireless hand, a soft prayer, 

and a dug up front lawn in some American suburb 

where you placed your eternity.