The cold will always exist
It will always find us
It'll wrap itself around our frame
And squeeze until we're dust
And the agreement we had with fall
Will always break our trust
And like the leaves
We wither away
Lost.

What belongs to us
other than the self
we frightfully lay claim to
buried and heaped upon
by the thoughts and opinions of society
judging our wealth
to be less than our value.
Words do not belong to us
we lose ownership in the act of speaking
and hearing ears that gather them up
only capable of reinterpreting
the gift or the curse.
We belong to ourselves
and nearly to each other
caged by the sameness
of the struggle to exist.

                       Anwar Francis

dear you, dear eyes
in your lovely sockets,
your presence is poetry,
an experience i cannot sculpt
into words precisely,perfectly,patiently:
pauses and punctuations, the words
i want to kiss into your mouth
and then tease with my tongue.

i seek solace/solar/suns,you dress my fingers with a
gentle grip and your scooping motions-
oh the waxing crescent moon;i see-
now i see clearly that the moon
is dark and round akin to your pupils.
once an abyss,no w a world beyondddddddd!
what blithesome business

i once thought the moon had a
face of a man and I still do but the moon
found its way to a face of a man I know.

stark silence, silly matters, subtly, just subtly
i find myself looking up/wards,wards,wards
and enjoying earnest pleasures in p
ain/eeling/inching/ulling, an unearthly joy found
between my bleeding fingers and my nails
(or lack thereof)

maybe the moon is alive,has skin,breathes and
sometimes talks/i know, i know it, i’ve felt it.
I KNOW IT as i,i, i

passively watched the blood moon;I’m
certain and I bet all my cuticles on this
that i know pretty pretty eyes when i see them
in a drunken fear fun fantasy falling falling

and i form your fluttering fleeting
shadow w w w wwwwwww           .

//

yoi were(as) meant to go when the sun comes up

i have a bulimic personality
taking in
more and more
until
all at once,
i snap,
throwing up words
of regret,
then looking down
at what i've done,
and
hating
myself.

I know what happens to a dream deferred.
Rather than dry up
or ooze like a festering sore
it yellows, then browns
then falls slowly to the ground
like leaves in the cold.

Dreams deferred do not smell
of rotten meat, or a syrupy sweet
but of cherry blossoms
and people hurrying down the street
sharing silence or words
with unnoted glances in between.

A dream deferred does not sag
like a heavy load
or even explode.
Instead it spreads
like moonlight.
It takes hold
and does not let go.

There is a bird that knows my name
each day sitting at my window
it talks to me
and I don't know what it is saying
but I know it knows my name
so I listen.
I don't move closer to the window
with open shutters
and the bird calling my name--
a little softer than before.