I’m overwhelmed
(but that’s nothing new)
only this time by
a strange desire to burst into laughter
half-delighted and half-hysterical
This holiday season,
December is a gift
and one I didn’t think I’d get.
Sweat, blood and tears, baby
Waking up soaked at 4 AM
and once or twice screaming
******* sticky red
my throat raw from the dig of my nails
Because I’ll feel better after I puke.
All that oh-so-dignified naked crying
because you know nothing says fighter
like slumped over in a ***** shower.
But here I am;
Happy New Year, me.

All I want to be is
a woman to behold
but I am a little girl
in tears again.

Born of a country I barely remember
I did not spend a childhood
sprinting across fields of sugarcane as I maybe could,
but my legs are that sweet brown anyway, of the earth
of a land of Always-June and Never-December.
I wonder if the rainforests remember my name
or how, when I was born, they wove into my hair
that deep-dark jaguar-black I’ll always wear,
which millions of miles away, is still the same.
Maybe had I stayed a few years more
I might remember the smell of midnight rain showers
Of golden afternoons and those Caribbean flowers,

that in this house, only my mother longs for.
But instead I know only what came in suitcases
that relatives brought, of achar, casrip, curry powders,
pepper-sauce to make your stew a little louder.
Foreign things finding homes in faraway places.
This land I left behind;
is it still mine?

I don’t want to go to Heaven anymore
because Heaven is an eternity
and I don’t want to be me for even a second more;
Not for all the bliss in the world.

A teacher once told me
I should never begin a sentence with
“I think”
because everything you say is what you think.
But somewhere along the line,
I stopped saying “I think” instead
because I needed to fake something like confidence
state every opinion like a fact
Bold, built up brick walls
making my every statement that much stronger
But there’s something to be said
for sentences that start with I think
I’m starting to wonder if it doesn’t take more bravery
to be tentative
that you might begin to say
I could be wrong; I am sometimes.
I’m not unfailing,
I hope that’s okay.

I summoned the devil
in all the coaxing dulcet tones of a lover
to make a little trade.
He appeared to reply
in something sounding suspiciously like amusement
that contrary to popular belief,
he did not buy souls.
Why, he wondered
would he bother with such trivial humanities?
so I plucked from my chest
the thing in question
that he might know
there are not so many stars in the sky
as neurons firing in my mind.
and I showed him exquisite pain
and deliriously beautiful sadness
anger so searing I shook to contain it
All the things a devil delights in
cannot be felt so deeply as by a soul
that has tasted misery again and again
and lived to wish to tell the tale.
He moaned in half-ecstasy
tones thick with desire
to name my price.
I asked only for peace at last
How cruel!
he cried, not un-admiringly
To make one long for something so desperately
and name a price they cannot pay.
For peace, he said
Can only be found through one's own demons
It comes from acceptance
of one's self entirely; not absence.
So I left,
having wrung good advice
from the devil himself.

Tell me, beloved, how many people you have killed
in your mind, over and over
Tell me of the throats you have twisted
and of the deaths you have relished
whisper them into my hair in the dead of the night
Tell me of their perpetual last breaths
So I may know the darkest parts of your soul
and love them also.