It's in the silence.
The gestures.
The eyes. The crinkle of a smile.
The tempered breath.

It's in the silence.
Where love gives birth.

It's easiest in the silence.
Raw and pure.

If I were a wise old fool
Or a duck out of luck
Would I count my money
by thimble or by a dumping truck

I'm glad I have no such problems
I broke the rules and bank
I own a four cornered mansion
On every street with steeply sloping banks

I have no problems eating
I mark every foodline on a map
I own stock in Salvation Army
I bought off this persuasive chap

I worry not for tomorrow
Today is good enough for me
I've been told I have no future
So say the fortune tellers that is all they see

Oh well , oh whale , oh wail
It doesn't matter me
Time now for a free lunch
Then in your alley I will surely go to ***

When drinking
by the fire

I can feel myself  
come undone

My nights have
never been colder

And I’m unnerved  
by what’s to come

So I focus on flames
to hide my endless
gaze

All the ghost’s  
Inside my head

Dare I say they
call my name

When I close my eyes

And feel the pull

Welcome to Gotham!
Here is your pass,
“Just a little pin *****”,
Pull up your mask,
The Joker’s still laughing,
“Boys will be girls”
Enjoy your ****,
“It’s a messed up world”
Bat man is out there,
Make no mistake,
You would never notice without the cape,
Yes, the weeds legal,
But it going fast,
“Space cowboy” says hi,
Pull up your mask.
BLC©2022

Hell is shaped for the hand of a wishful, foolish painter
Its caverns wait for us to paint over the mistakes again
And again
And again the walls become crude and rough under the layers of our harm.

I was on the brick and cobblestones one afternoon, among groups of wishful oppressors, their hands clenched in dried paint. They ask how to scrub it off. They’ve heard “Black Lives Matter” but they don’t know where, or when.
It’s here, and now, and everywhere, and always.

Hell is shaped like my young metatarsals, creaking and aching under some unrealized purpose.
Hell is shaped like a ladder that my ancestors soaked in lighter fluid
And waited for everyone else to scramble up.

Hell is shaped like venom tongues and weapons alchemied in colonialism’s genocide. It’s also shaped like disposable responsibility and eyes that stray from the fire and like greed in the flag with nails in the palm.

I was brought up in a stolen, and false, but beautiful and loving safety. I would give my sense of direction to let someone else’s baby have a memory of swimming the meters from one parent to the other in the shallows if the ocean– so small, so humbled, but so, so safe.

I was in a park when I had to write a lawyer’s defense fund number on my forearm. A cop car trailed our peaceful protest like an unwanted lantern. I am grateful, but maybe not well-deserved, to say that is the most scared I’ve ever been.

Hell is shaped like too-loose strings on an old guitar. No matter the harmonic chord, there will always be dissonance in the punishment of created evils.

I was not raised to believe in hell. I’ve been told by the outlying sign that it waits for me. I still think it is a metaphor. I wave my rainbow flag and breathe through my white skin. I am kneeling to be knighted by my moms and waiting to pull up those lying down. But I can’t reach for Dominique or Layla or Brayla or Tony or Muhlaysia or any of the names I’ve been burdened to forget because they are not here. I can’t reach for Michael, or Emmitt, or Breonna, or George, Ahmaud, Daunte, Eric, Sandra, Toyin, Trayvon, Elijah, or Moses.

Hell is shaped like a twisted funeral florist. It makes me want to scream, “God, let me have enough arms and energy to hold as many flowers as I can”, because I need to give them out while everyone is still here.

I can’t say that we go anywhere when we’re gone
That said, have you ever stood somewhere where everything washes up? Everything lost, everything left, everything broken
The ocean is not endless, no
Endless means forgotten
The ocean is everything
When something falls in, it rides the currents for as long as it takes to get somewhere.
Somewhere might be sinking, or in a fish’s gut, on the great Pacific garbage patch or on a little island
If you want to know how to get there I’ll ask you if you know the neighbors
Everything washes up there
Everything lost, everything left, everything lingering
Lobster pots
Shredded lines (the ocean holds all barriers)
Broken buoys (everything that floats, floats forever)
Seagull bones
Cans and bottles
Even rudders
There are stories of how tractor beach got its name:
There was once a whole tractor that washed up on its shores
Gears, wheels, engine, rusted metal (all things lost are not all things forgotten).
Pieces of it are long since buried in the rocks and mussel shells
But the ocean has parts of it somewhere
The ocean has parts of us, somewhere.
The ocean has parts of the seagulls and their wiry legs
Or the murky tidepools (even when we are left behind we are still ocean).
If planets were marbles the earth would be the only blue sphere in the whole pile
The ocean is the universe’s blue moon
One day a tractor came through one of its portals to an island
Heaven is a doubt, but perhaps heaven is Tractor Beach: a place where everything washes up. Where the egrets perch dreamlike above beach roses and sumacs. Where gulls kneel by broken eggs in nests of rocks. Where trash is treasure is the legend of a tractor in tide. A legend of escape, a place to float away, and a view like no other. What else could we need after life?

black skies stretch
in darkness, the clouds
dissolve into rain,
the night is lacquered
with varnish like
a wooden floor,
shiny and surreal -

it breathes of night
bird and the magnolia
light of the moon, quivers
and then is still, wraps us
in the mirrored waters of the stars.

the moon elevates
the night from darkness to
hypnotic light, bathes
the world in silver, flows
with our tears and our
softly spoken words,

transcends like lazarus
to a sky witnessed
through centuries,
loved and worn like
our favourite old clothes.