let it not be confused
let no one else's name
ring throughout these sentences
let this be a hatchet
let me put this to rest
this is not a test
i don't want to think
about shipwrecks anymore
i am tired of folding apologies
into origami birds
and placing them
at the headstones to your tantrums
this is not is not geology class
these are promises
written on razorblades
      & if you are getting choked up
        then maybe you should be
maybe we should be buried
with our telescopes face down
my mouth is full of sorry
all for being honest
we are falling out of orbit
we are burning bystanders
so cast away your callous condolences
because no one is clapping
in this waist deep water
this is not a baptism
so do not tell strangers
that this was a chance to drown
any differently
i am not a catalogue
of constellations you cannot name
this is not mythology
so stop believing your horoscope
i am not a wishing well
i am just a wall for you
to paint post nuclear fallout & antonyms for catharsis on
we destroy the things
that are not ours-
the wanton ways
we embody wrecking *****
and then cry over the rubble
this is not a heap or a mosaic
this is leaping
off a thousand story building
with no one to catch you
at the bottom & maybe
that's why some quiet moments
are so fragile, maybe that's why butterflies have mimicry
your words are black powder
and poetry is your musketry
i guess that makes me your blindfold

I will not cover my breast as an apology for this body
I will not bow my head as an apology for being beautiful
I will not smile at your misogynistic jokes to massage your ego
I will not let liquor give you an excuse as to why it is okay for you to pin my arms
And take my lack of communication as me wanting it
Me wanting you
To take from me something you would not get from a more alert woman.
I will not purchase pants
In favor of dresses and skirts that do not ******* say "this is yours"
Nothing about even my bare body screams "this is yours"
Nothing about my passing glance says "take me" unless I tell you to.
I cannot submit to a man who doesn't fix his mouth to ask me if I want to.
I will not walk this life as a nun hoping you don't pound me to the pavement in your struggle to take control
And gain this power you feel should automatically be yours
To overrule my *****.
No matter
How bare my breast are
How high my skirt rises
How flirty my friendliness is
How my back slopes
How my hands move
How firm my no is
                 my stop
                 I can't
                please don't
                please leave
                not yours
                don't ****
                please stop
                not yours
                not yours
                no
                no
                no.
And with a mind a weak as yours
You shatter
You break
You tear through flesh.
You forget we are made of the same bones
That their is flesh here
That now holds taint here.
I will never find an ocean deep enough to drown myself of you
Absolve myself of sins I had no say in.
And no matter how brittle my bones are
How broken my spirit is
My lips will seal themselves,
Hollow out any lingering screams
Because, society will tell me that I made myself too pretty
That I showed too much skin
in contrast to the heated sun
That I swallowed too much liquor
And walked too ******* ****
And danced a bit too free
all in preparation for
                                   concrete, cold, hard, forced, penetrated
                                   remnants of you.

I've scheduled an appointment about 3 different times but, cancelled for each.
I didn't think there was any purpose in laying down the voices in my head for a stranger
When I've spent so much time building cement walls of silence between anyone who has ever gotten too close to me.
I have spent this lifetime creating sound proof dream catchers of my screams.
I am not known to grab hold of clingy hearts
Because, it's hard to hold on to things that are trying to do more than grasp me.
I say goodbye or pass them along as often as the tide comes into the shore.
But, I do not come back as it does.
But, the voices in my head do.
The doubts they hit me like teeth to concrete
The anxiety hits me like 10 ft deep waters with no air to breathe in
And I am not the swimming kind.
I am a runner, so it is hard for me to live in water deep enough to drown in.
I have created water deep enough to drown in.
I have become so controlled that I am numb to hands
And I fall to words so easily.
I scare me
My voice scares me
My thoughts scare me .
Night hits like the sun after a storm
And I can't figure out which one I am or which I want to be.
I have created a tornado of this mind
A wildfire of this heart
And a tomb of this body
And I don't know if I have self-shattered too profusely
And too quietly to fix it.
So I am here now,
You ask me why,
                              And I am here because now
The broken pieces can't be ignored anymore,
It's not getting easier in the morning anymore.
It's getting harder to wake
And I don't know how many more days I can be here
Like this...
This is my last chance to fix it
                                          fix her
                                          fix me.

how to write a poem:
1. think about something until it hurts
2. bury it in paper
I think that is what scares me…
That I will wake up one day,  happy that he has to leave
Or wishing that you would exit my mornings.
I am scared that the idea tempts me more than you ever will.
All I see when I look forward, is me waking to the sun
Nesting in my solitude.
I gravitate towards freedom
Something I am not sure love will allow of me.
And I’d like to not be selfish with your time
Which is why I keep you from me,
But some days temptation engages me in indulgence,
And I play around with the idea that, I could stay here
And stand in this
But, when the leaves settle and my heart stops trembling
I grow restless
I grow weak with leaving
…. And I think gold of you,
Which is why I keep me from you.
You asked why I can’t fall in this …with you,
And I’m warning you,
It’s because I’ll leave.
I have to.
And I always will.

I am not soft
I do not know how to be beautiful
I don't know how to be half in half out
I don't know how to calm these storms that want to see you.
I cannot dim this light
or handle you gently touching me
I am not fragile
I don't know how to be small
You keep trying to place me in your back pocket
While I am trying to stand next to you and hold your hand
I am tired of preparing for flight at the beginning of every landing
I am tourist trying to create a home to come back to...
and I know we can't make homes out of people
but I want to feel it when I'm with you .
I want you to feel it when I'm with you
I want you in this when I'm away from you
I am no gentle woman
Some days I am walking contradiction
but my soul is always evolving
always extending out of this being... beautiful
And I want you.
Yes I want you.

My mother and her mother lived lonely.
2. I want to be held without being held captive.
3. I keep trying to find reasons to lay next to you.
4.  I can’t bear feeling lonely when I am not alone.
5. I can’t make me love you.
6. Even the man I long for knows I am leaving.
7. I am scared you will understand me and I will no longer belong to myself.
8. My brother, is his father… their feet carry them the same.
9. I am scared that you will find my love inadequate
10. You will become wanderlust and realize I have nothing resembling a map inside me.
11. A part of me is simply yearning to take you in my mouth… these hands.
12. I am a woman who is vocal in my wanting.
13. You will not **** me voiceless.
14. I sometimes confuse your silence with leaving.
15. I don’t want our love to be synonymous with chains.
16.  I need you to love me gently.
17. I have come too far.
18. Leave me wild here.
19. I want you honest. I want you kind.
20. I am both goddess and human.
21. I think if I run fast enough I won’t feel you leaving.
22. My skin is wet with regrets for all the times I stayed silent. The times I tamed my hunger.
23.  I can’t remember the first cut that trained me to ache for those who don’t seek me.
24. I tell myself I don’t want the things that I am scared to lose.
25. I have not been alive when next to another person in years.

"You were a moment . You are not beautiful enough, you don't give back enough to interrupt my solitude. "

Forgive yourself
Perfect was never a word suited for you
Love yourself
Everything comes back to this
Love your sister
She has been picked apart, degraded, and has an internal war eating her from the inside out
Love your brother
He has a time stamp of deliverance to a life of incarceration, bullets released from an absence of sense, lack of educated, blind ambitious followers.
Raise your head
You are a Goddess created
with disarming beauty in mind.
Continue to place one foot in front of the other
You are meant and strongly designed for forward movement.
Take no steps back, do not bow down your head, do not close your mouth
In fear that judgment will fall
It will, but you must speak anyways.
Your voice is imperative
to the growth of lost girls who are unsure what real women are made of.
Your voice is imperative to the peaking of the minds of men unsure what to look for in a Queen, show him.
Your voice is imperative to the readjustment of the image of
Black Women with large voices
Black Women with high diction
Black Women with love language
Black Women with literary genius
Black Women filled with nothing less than the peace & love God has manifested within us.
Black Women
Black Women
Black Women
Who love Black men like double chocolate moist bliss
Who love White men like dark roast coffee filled with cream
Who love Latino men like Butterscotch candy dipped in chocolate
The list goes on
Black Women who love like we are bound to implode if we don't give the universe what it is that we need back.
Black Women
Your Mother
Black Women
Your Sister
Black Women
Your Friend
Black Women
Your Lover
Black Woman
Love Her.

I saw her crop a rose
Right early in the day,
And I went to kiss the place
Where she broke the rose away
And I saw the patten rings
Where she o’er the stile had gone,
And I love all other things
Her bright eyes look upon.
If she looks upon the hedge or up the leafing tree,
The whitethorn or the brown oak are made dearer things to me.

I have a pleasant hill
Which I sit upon for hours,
Where she cropt some sprigs of thyme
And other little flowers;
And she muttered as she did it
As does beauty in a dream,
And I loved her when she hid it
On her breast, so like to cream,
Near the brown mole on her neck that to me a diamond shone;
Then my eye was like to fire, and my heart was like to stone.

There is a small green place
Where cowslips early curled,
Which on Sabbath day I traced,
The dearest in the world.
A little oak spreads o’er it,
And throws a shadow round,
A green sward close before it,
The greenest ever found:
There is not a woodland nigh nor is there a green grove,
Yet stood the fair maid nigh me and told me all her love.