I remember climbing out my window,
skulking off into a violent blizzard.
Lost in teenage anguish,
my feet carried me forward through the storm.
Two a.m. and a mile I out I realize,
I'm walking towards her house
Panic slammed my body like a tidal wave,
my nerves vibrated,
shaking the bitter cold.
I carried on determined.
No plan of action,
just full of **** and vigor and something...
Something I hadn't yet known.
The walk up her street is done with tremendous effort,
like swimming in jello.
Standing outside her house,
I'm suddenly aware of another obstacle.
I don't have a cell-phone.
Which window is her room?
Assuming it's upstairs, this is fifty - fifty you sonofabitch.
Take the risk.
I throw a small stone but hear it explode like a firecracker on the window.
Silence.
I reach for another when a soft voice calls my name.
We stand in the street and talk for a while,
holding one another.
I'm sorry, I can't stay, they probably know I'm gone.
I just... I just wanted to say goodbye
I walked backwards the whole way down the street.
Streetlights and snowfall created an amber aura around her.
That,
was the first time I knew what love was.
Sometimes I think it was the last time, too.

Why am I called "white"?
Why am I an absence of color
To be associated with purity
Flawless innocence
A clean slate

Why am I called "white"
When I have the blood of monsters in my veins
There is nothing immaculate about my heritage
Simply from a lack of pigmentation
My hair is braided with the ******* of masses
My eyes see the broken lives of the oppressed
My ears hear the echoes of homelands invaded
And my hands hold the books with the historic lies enclosed

Why am I called "white"
Compared, as if, to the paper
On which my people's crimes could be written
Repeating so frequently with so many new victims
But we are never called to justice
And the cycle remains unbroken
When we are addressed
We stand up from our thrones, screaming
"Unfair, cruel, why attack me?!
I don't understand, what privilege do you see?!"
We act like the victims, fed by the system
And we eat it up with our metaphoric silver spoons

Why am I called "white"
I've been stained from the years of hatred
Perpetuated by a people who claim guiltlessness
Just because they are a newer generation
What was once called subjugation
Is now appropriation
But both are used to deny culture and rights from nations
But I won't sit by and prolong this delusion that we are any better
Any more beautiful then any other one of God's creations

So today you started with the why's, making excuses and reasons as you have every season since I looked at you, but now I see you and you think you can use the glint from that shiny silver tongue to blind me so you can bind me in your arms until I can't breath. And while you seem pretty qualified at splitting hairs and splitting sheets that doesn't mean you'll be splitting legs, not unless you get down on your knees and join this Sunday service, my body is a temple and you will worship it.
     It is not a crime scene to be inspected, not a base to be infiltrated and not fire to be quenched. The masses have called out "Sister art thou there?" and I have replied rising from what remains of my childlike mind saying,"Yey, I am the mosque, come to me and fill me with your joy and celebrations, but only the worthy shall enter my sacred halls and learn my holy obsessions." So don't think you can break me in because I am not something to be broken, not something to be dominated or overtaken in one moment of reckless inspiration.
     I see you shaking. Whether it's in fear or lust or just from the itch of dust forming on your skin from sitting patiently and waiting for the day when I give in, but just like you, it won't come. So whether you are wide eyed or tired eyed you will behold the glory that is within me, the strength that defines me and realize that I am baptized in the dawn of a new day. And you should know that I will not be coerced and as far as I'm concerned if you haven't learned by now that I am not your outlet, not just something to help you come around when your feeling down, your living puppet, then you never will. So you will never fill the gap between my thighs with your lies and turn around and call it love.
     Preach all you want but this choir isn't listening, it will sing to drown out the deafening sound of your screeching, so after hours when my church is closed and your feeling empty and alone just remember that next communion I'll be waiting for your confessions, and then maybe you'll receive my blessings. But before then my doors are closed until you know the difference between impulse and infatuation.
     So until the day when you figure out what you need to do and say, focus on your words, and not the way my bees talk to your birds.

In my chest there is a bird
Who's fluttering spurs all my words
A muffled song her sorrows sing
In ribcage trapped a fragile thing
My body is a birdcage

And butterflies, those wicked things
They dart around on razor wings
My insides now all ribbons be
My body is a birdcage

Translucent skin on hallow bones
And as time goes emptiness grows
A song once sung now no one knows
My body is a birdcage

Now windswept ribs begin to bleach
Sandshifted joints begin to preach
The heavens high a bird does reach
From what was once a birdcage

I lay in wait,

for the dead of night,

to come visit you,

and hold you tight.

                ~

I seep into your dreams,

you sense it I know,

tossing and turning,

but you can't make me go.

                 ~

I know you secret,

I know what you've done,

the smile on your face,

as you killed each one.

                 ~

Cut them up,

hid them away,

keeping a small token,

to remember the day.

             ~

I'm telling you now,

your time is nearly here,

you're going to regret,

all those girls you went near.

                  ~

He's going to make you,

feel all of their pain,

then he'll drag you to hell,

to relive it over and over again.

                   ~

So on this night of halloween,

you had better watch you step,

the devil will be coming for you,

to make you his new play pet.

Bodies of black water
Marching towards the shore
In tides and waves of hordes
Overlapping as they roar.

On the pier, I caught her
Waist in molten charcoal
Whirled in tidal black hole
Engulfing her as it folds.

Daylight, upon the mer
Awakened from my sleep
Dreams of haunting Banshee
Sinking On The Iron Sea.

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to **** you.
You died before I had time ----
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My ****** friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ----

Not God but a *******
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the *****.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two ----
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagersnever liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you *******, I'm through.