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“I Love You”s melted
Under my tongue ‘til you were
Bitter nostalgia
The beauty about being black
Is that I have tears and scars and
anxiety and violations and incarcerations
and fear and joy and love and
music and resilience and hope
and triumph and defeat and
defiance and perseverance and
intelligence and diligence and
adaptability and understanding
All woven through my being, my skin
My essence
That could not be stripped away
In 400 years.
I am a living embodiment of all
these emotions
Passed down from my ancestors
to my grandparents to my parents to
Me.
Black people cannot be brought down
Because we are the backbone of a nation.
We are the lifeblood of its people.
We possess a magic that no other people
Can attain because we attained it
Through suffering and more suffering
And more suffering after that when we
thought we couldn't possibly suffer any
longer.
We survive and will continue to survive
Because that is our creed, our way of life
We possess a rare entity
Unattainable to anyone else
It's strictly ours.
It's one of the few things we have been
able to preserve-
Magic.
370

Heaven is so far of the Mind
That were the Mind dissolved—
The Site—of it—by Architect
Could not again be proved—

’Tis vast—as our Capacity—
As fair—as our idea—
To Him of adequate desire
No further ’tis, than Here—
from the    deepest pit
  resting in   my heart
   screams in terror
  choice, now error,
           i love
           you
10:37am//05022017
I spent months
setting them up

those emotional "dominoes"

black rectangles on end
balanced just so
white spots spelling out

ego
    emotions
                soul

just a sharp stroke
of a tongue
on one corner
and
they fall...
   and fall...
      and fall...

they lay
      scattered
                  and
                     chaotic

on their backs
          like beetles
unable to turn

their undersides exposed
                             and vulnerable

how many times
            can they be realigned

how many times
              before the spots erode

how many times
               before it's empty inside

like dead beetles'
                       dry, brittle shells?
An older poem I came across.
A broken guitar tells me to shut it
on every rest note.
And I tell myself to
ditch old baggage
on the side of the road
to clean my tattered knapsack
of cobwebs and broken light bulbs.

So I divest,

Decompress in present
because right now, I'm at peace.
You speak over church bells
at the top of the hour
and I listen like
nothing else matters.
But I only hear the future
My future, your future, our future
                    the world's future.

It's not often,
but every once in a while
midnight slaps me with a sound
I can't explain.
Even if I explain myself
I ramble around the point
like an arrow with no tip.

The weird thing about time
is it's a lot like music,
or a galaxy,
but right in the palm
of soft hands and ambitious souls
It only makes sense with experience,
and getting lost in a pavilion
of nervous butterflies
only seen in lucid dreams.

The world is old. We're young.
We're lost. And so is everyone else.
Tell me about your favorite constellation,
your favorite letter of the alphabet,
what makes you tick,
and why.

One day, after learning about your spectrum,
and where it intersects with mine
we'll dance in space.
I'll come to my senses
and question nothing

Not even the silence between our lips.
 May 2017 Leory Santana dawn
ryn
Today is knowing
that the night before
was only a feeble attempt
to delude myself
into thinking
that the world spins around
me and my ideals.

Today I know better.
Today I am sober.
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