What is human

**I'd really love to get some feedback on how to structure this poem. I've never really studied or written poetry (at least, not since the rhymed couplets of grade school assignments) but I'd like to fit the ideas I have down here into some sort of cohesive form.**



how do i speak about the other world?
earnestly, without forced reverence,
in testament
not to what it was to me
(i was changed, yes),
but to what it itself is?

can i paraphrase awe
without the sallow tinge of exoticism,
without crippled pity, assumed shame,
or is it corrupted in the utterance?

am i naive to suppress
the insinuating murmurs of history,
like tropical vines encroaching upon
the delicate organic matter of our
bus stop banter?
i fear for our small tender friendship exposed
to cynical prose
burning against our bare skin
like the deadening noontime sun above Probolinggo.

can i admit that there
i shed the careful habits of my education
or forgot them in my luggage?
insisted i could see without the collegiate spectacles
which reveal around one's vision
the reddish aura of Context,
born of a dozen piled syllabi and
edged with the blood of Latin and Greek affixes?

i couldn't think about the symbols:
the mournful, howling minaret,
or the boy's baffling colonial primer
marked and smudged by three generations of eager hands,
edifying eager heads with
scenes of 'taking tiffin' with one's British nan.

carefully, i print an address on the last page.
am i false in the gesture?
speaking through the primer he shouts
against the droning elegy,
embrace me, Misses!

there is no subtext
in the half-moons of his fingernails
along my sunburnt forearm.

your theories have no place in this moment.
to subject the vestiges of our afternoon
to interpretation
would be itself demeaning to him and me
and what is human.