Thick like butter,
My thighs and feelings are delicious
Eat me up
After all – you’re like the little kid who sticks their finger in the batter.

Isn’t it funny how a taste is all it takes to get hooked?
Watch as every confection I formulate becomes
Another fool’s “gold,” a temporary treasure

Hours spent, sweat dripping down my brow
Staining my favorite outfit, that’s what chasing you feels like
Giving you my heart feels like catering to the President
Hell, I make you three meals a day

At breakfast, I start pulling myself together
Eggs, brilliance, cream, sugar, spice, insecurity, vulnerability
And just a dash of sass

From the shower, I go to work
Where I'll inevitably toil harder than the other kiddies in their
Creepy crawler kitchen sets
Like cream, I rise to the top
Hoping to get the grade A stamp that makes me
Gourmet-quality

At lunch, I’d write you poems
Drizzle my words into pans, into molds, into text boxes, letters and journals
Pour out my soul and scrape the things I normally hide out
With a spatula
****! I let you lick the batter while I starved in the hopes of
Looking appetizing enough for you

By dinner, you needed a snack
As usual, you don’t know what you want
Chocolate or vanilla, me or the other boy, or maybe we’re on a diet again?
What’s mother say, “You just need to watch what you put in your mouth?” I'll try to avoid it but inevitably I'll be stocking the pantry hoping to be diverse enough

Then the finale,
Served up on a platter, I throw myself at you nightly.
The waitresses couldn’t package this cake more easily
Aged for 25 years, this is a deceptive little ****

See, I’m richer than any other slice you’ve ordered
Even though I’m poor. Nutritious and wholesome, I make sure I’m brains, body and as balanced as I could be to taste so sweet. I make sure I’m your favorite flavor despite knowing that I’ll never satisfy your cravings. You've had your fill elsewhere but you're here to eat it too...

It doesn’t matter how well-stocked this bakery is
I’m always the desert that’s just too much, maybe you need something less substantial?I’ll watch from the bakery window while you skip on over to the nearest fast food stop to buy your love from the dollar menu
You’re not good enough for these words, this icing, heavy like my heart,
A unique recipe

Baby, you might want this cake
unfortunately, it’s a seasonal treat
and you just missed me on the menu
You always say you could have it, but you
just can't eat it too...

The men shout at me as they drive by
“******, walk like a man!”
They hoot, shout, and laugh
As sunlight blinds their white-trash getaway.

I look around and think
How ridiculous to be unable to walk
How insane for me to think that these legs
Move on their own.
How silly for me, the queen that I am,
To think that my kingdom was
Any place I was welcome.

To be queer and visible
Is to challenge
The stained muscle shirts
“wife beaters,” strung across
Tattooed skin and handlebar
Mustaches of the “real men”
Whose siren calls
Police my step.

Most men hate us
The Children of Naomi Campbell
Men, YES MEN, too unafraid
To straighten our walk
Loosen our pant legs
And be invisible.

To be properly gay
Acceptably gay, to be
Tolerable is to be invisible
To hide, to be “real man”

My manhood is ghostly
Terrifying even
My walk so dangerous that
It is unsafe to even drive by

My community is still
Dangerous, unreal
Waiting for the next truck to drive by
To beat me, tie me to a fence and leave me
Like Matthew Shepard
A ghost on a fencepole

Unwanted, dangerous,
My people are a threat
Legs too long threatening the ability of
“real men” to have simple desires
They will do whatever it takes
To keep it easy.

Walk like a man, they yelled.
I yell back the names of my family:
Tiffany Edwards,
Zoraida Reyes, Kandy Hall
Yaz’min Shancez

Bodies that didn’t walk the right way
These ghosts were once threatening too.
Simply existing means threatening
"real men" and their women

Swinging my hips is literally deadly
To be flirtatious is to be threatening
To invite violence, attention
To get what I want, to be made a man

Real man, I am not real
As if my only job is to
Show others how to walk,
As if the rest of me
Is simply fake, fantasy, irrelevant

See how easily queer people
Are watered down to something unidimensional,
Something that is only a fragment of
“real” people – we are ghosts
Moving among you

Threatening, ******
Never just going to work
But always somehow
threatening, challenging
And forcing fantasies onto the world

Why do we always challenge
What is real? What is normal?
Why can’t a man strut? Why isn’t manhood
Something other than what swings with my
Legs?

Real. Ghostly. Fake. Invisible. Dangerous.
What I hear is powerful, noted, interesting,
….maybe even desirable. (GASP!)

When I walk now, I walk with an army of ghosts
Led by the fallen, queens, and divas
who threatened the men of the past.
I live their lessons and proudly
swish my hips in honor of my adopted
****** ancestors.

We Sashay however we want
Because we've realized that
a "real" men is always
Just a step away.

Inside of my body
Amidst death and poison
a virus lurks

in every
puddle,
pumping
blood that flushes
my tired heart
like
the river
Styx

Amidst this
battlezone
that is my
failing being
lies
a secret, sleeping

The cells swim by
They are
rarer
now like precious gems
the factories of my
fighting body

produced like
diamonds
born amidst feverish
forges within
a toxic mine

The gems,
they call them T-cells,
are now suicide bombers
converted daily
by the
whisper of
necromancy

They call
this
hex ***
a war against
your own
treasures

Yet my T-cells
are more,
runes blazing
mystic and
glowing,
antigen sorcery
that wards against
failing

Amidst
the 300,000 +sleeper
cells
that abandoned
my cause

Insurgence
bulges with
nightmare

The cells
clamour
growing with the whispers
of past victims
now roped into the
mystic chains, the wizards
call it RNA,
that bind us

An ironic family
of ghosts
who live
in each other
"junk DNA"

My body
is no junk;
instead a treasure
- what do they say
one man's trash?

My body
an
amalgamation
30 years
magic growing
twisted
like thorny vines
that must consume
their
helpless host

My
T-cells
inception
Worlds within me
the "JUNK"
of
lovers past
becomes entangled
in archives
carved in my bones.

Amidst recipes
of a poison
I cannot trace,
I am
ironically
linked
into

a
family of
ancestors
whose cries
beat in
my still
working heart

The drum
of the long fallen
crying for justice
...My blood

Our blood.
chains enmeshing
....ghosts I
will never know

Now parts of me
that lie sleeping in
Trojan horses,
all my own.

Dust has settled
on the cool, tile floors
where I dropped my heart
after ripping it out

It got tired of counting
unused pillows, the same ol'
memories that don't
comfort us to sleep.

Aware that it
owns enough silverware
for twenty but
is always re-using
the same spoon

Laying on the counter
in hazy morning light,
a reminder that we (My Heart and I)
have our secret, lonely routine.

Laying there on the *****
tile mosaics that have
danced in the window's pall
petrifying slowly.


Dusty; in need of
repair,
the streetlamps dance
against shadows
on the pillows that
have forgotten

*what it's like to be
cradled(?)