Gymnopedie
Gymnopedie and rain
I was born on a windowsill at midnight,
Smoke flowering in my lungs and clawing at my lips
The word rises and rises and rises and then slips
And everything that I wanted
Everything that I wanted to say,
Was gone when the street light
Gave itself over to the day

Gymnopedie
Gymnopedie and rain and rust
I was born on the intersection of heroine and industrialism
Fingers gripping cold steel, heaving my body up and over the city
And we climb higher and higher and higher until the expansion looked pretty
And everything that I wanted
Everything that I wanted to be
Became trapped in the rafters
Trapped for an eternity

Gymnopedie
Gymnopedie and rain and rust and warmth
I was born head-bent and spine snapped beneath his roomate's bed
Indentations of a foreign language searing its history along my skin
And the glow spreads and spreads and spreads within
And everything that I wanted
Everything that I wanted to do
It all fell into place
When I fell into you

Dear Mother,
When you gave birth to me you held me so tight,
And I was your light bundled in grey and blue.
So what happened to you, did you not love me anymore?
When you let the evil in, let him shake me to my core?
At the tender age of four, you knitted dreadlocks to my head
And read me stories in my bed, and said
That daddy loves us still. And Daddy was always out to ****.
And it's something I still feel
when I let men **** me 'til I'm ill.
Dear mother, what happened to you?  You beautiful angel wrapped in robes
With henna, bangles, flats, and globes...
Hanging from your ear
mother dear?
I have your wedding pictures around
And the screaming still resounds resounds resounds resounds the sound
Of you getting hit, it never left me, not one bit.
Sixteen, I was a truant, I was your friend, your therapist.
At 18, I loved you so much I hid the train tracks on my wrist
And never passed a test,  you still said I was the best but I never ever got my rest
Because the pounding in my chest because the pounding on the door, because you crying on the floor because your partner to this day destroyed my faith and so much more.
Dear mother who are you, thou that thinks in whiskey dreams who drinks and drinks and drinks to break my love stitched in your seams?
Oh mother dear you almost killed me
Why would you **** the one you love?
You could have killed my brother, love.
And  I am running out of love.
And it hurts how much I love your pretty face in every place
in every storefront where we wandered

drunk and happy

(Your ****** dreadlocks black and *****)

When I begged for a better life, Michele,
You couldn't bear it, called me snappy.
You didn't care for it , not at all, I was never invincible, you saw me fall
And didn't take it as any reason to commit to thriving and end your treason
And now I'm surviving on cigarettes and decrepit *** and loving you.
Mommy dear, what happened to us what happened to me what happened to you?

I wonder how you'd look -
on a mangy summer evening in June
when the party's over
and the midnight revelers are forced to retreat, sweating and reeking of regret and fireball, to raggamuffin sparkly cushions beneath Marley cut outs and pasted pastel hair,
bathed in moonlight, you,
standing beneath the light of the grimy fluorescent apartment sky
and dust-laden shadows, stumbling over empty yogurt cans bearing the markings of koolaid stains and milk curdles
towards me
would you
put your hand on my face, between my *******,
or the ridges of my fading tattoos,
or the bulbous bubbling of my old wounds?
me,
standing alone in the corner of a forgotten high rise
housing degenerates punks fiends trapped in an ***** daze or good boys just wanting to go back home to the verizon of heaven or sacramento.
Would you be soft
and tell me
that your poetry came from the heart?
soft, and swallow me  in coked out irises
silver or black or blue would you
hold my hand and ask for consent
because you're a romantic and poet and everything is what it meant?
or would
you
tear into me, tooth and claw?
would you abandon courtship law
and drive my body into the edge of the bookshelf that your mother gave you
(because she hated you)
until it
broke?
I wonder,
lights out empty room
empty bodies, static minds,
would you mind
me, bracing for a foothold in reality and, finding none, speaking in tongues until daylight drove us away with its decadent array of pockmarks and ***** perfume and baggy eyes and spit
would you say sorry and gather my things
or, in bed and eye to eye, tease the promise of more flings?
i wonder
I wonder, would you have been a friend or just a ******?
I wonder about your 3 am stubble
your eyes fluttering when you sleep
I wonder at the size of your fingers between my thighs,
chasing scars and counting out sheep
I wonder, if I had met you,
at the secrets we would keep.
I wonder, if I had met you,
could our treachery have run deep?

You
Waiting for you
My music on in the middle of the night so you would know that I was awake
That my space was the jive,
An unintentional jive
Fit for bare-face brutality and loose, loving lips
You
Knowing all of you
Fearing you
Fearing the things that I know
No - fearing the fact that I don't care,
That I pluck the red flags with abandon and present them to myself in a bouquet everyday that I see you
You
Your face in my tarot readings
Across the road, now smiling,
Now frowning
Now thunderous, asking, not finding,and falling
You
Between my fingertips
Sliding beneath my palm
Your hair hands chest pressed to my breast was the best
You pulling away, leaning far away, eyes averted to avoid my scrutiny wavering over your indecision
You begging me, teasing me, glancing back and somehow pleasing me
You, the subject of my poetry
The precursor to my insanity
You pretty pretty graffiti profanity
You, the wave tickling the shore
You the thunderous, cacophonic echoing of the storm
Far off in the future
Promising more
You, unjust,
You pathetic
You tempestuous
Profound,
You and your swagger
Your prophetic sound

Alaskan waterlight, silver stars swimming in fetid Northern Light heatwave

You,
You,
You.

You just make my mind rave

I was branded Holy by a bottle of prescription meds.
I woke up, untethered from the multichromatic threads.
And reaffirmed my worth with a display of spontenaeity.
Thinking, maybe the facade had cracked beneath a crack-head courting gaiety.

I don't know.

Daily, I shuffle through the dust on the moon.
I am one with the cosmic and logic-immune
And plagued by the shuttles that pockmark the earth.
I don't WANT a crash landing. I don't WANT that rebirth.

Seraphim candles and Sapphos live here.
The machining of my mind made that final frontier
Just a little bit clearer. And the horizon is real
As the heaviness of a bottle and shelf-life of a pill.

‘I believe in life’
Will you still look me in the eye if I say that?
The way you did, like I have potential. You’re not the aristocrat
Here.  You speak my language with a beautiful inflection
When I speak yours it twists your patience like a knife
How do you want me to say that a light is its shadow?
And I recognize that I’m lit so
I only know the tune of my presence
The songs that I sing
Do not mark my subservience
I feel so much love for you and your reminder that this infection
Was born with me, my back black wing