I woke up to the rose colored glasses being welded to my head. The pain is excruciating and i can’t remember, but according to the paperwork i asked for this. I willingly walked into this life. I refuse to leave. Why would i? Each time reality catches up to crack my perfect view, it’s fixed without me ever having to even ask. I try to see through the break. Please don’t think your other life goes unnoticed. I’m more aware to the deep and dark reality than you’d think i am, but i prefer to ignore it when I’m around you too. Our world is so much better. We’re on a downward spiral, in every way imaginable. I have never felt more safe. I have never felt more cheated in all my life. Why couldn’t you forewarn me just how good deception would taste laced with your spit? Some type of heads up that i’d become addicted to the way we feel skin on skin. if we can make it down this far, why couldn’t we go up too? It wouldn’t be easy, all of this has been so difficult. You’d only have to want to.

Ok, there’s no jailbreak.
Make room for my innocent alter ego,
because there’s nothing to rebel against.

There are zero classes in my nascent,
year-long, Harvard master’s degree.
They call it ‘self directed study’
and like rockets have stages,
I’ll have ‘self paced modules.’

Am I suddenly at Oxford University?
They’re quite famous for that (no formal classes).
Or am I suddenly grown up and trusted?
I obviously don’t have it all figured out yet,
so I’ll just trust the process.

When I started that other school
(that shall not be named), my advisor
handed me a computer printout - a list
with something like 40 courses on it.
I thought, “Oh, my God,” but one by one,
year over year, I checked-off those courses
and voila! They handed me a diploma.
It was a process.

I understand, if you’re disappointed about the jailbreak, but there’ll
be coffee breaks, lunch breaks, study breaks, bathroom breaks
and more than a few self-directed dance breaks. So stick around.

“You know,” my therapist said, so very seriously, a few years ago,
“you keep laughing.”
.
.
I've Got the World on a String by Robin McKelle
****** Soul Picnic by Ledisi & Billy Childs

I will not be
subdued.
Cages don't suit me.
I have to be free.
Fly
run
sing
dance in the
open fields, swim
in the river with
the fish and water snakes.
My soul can't be
taken without my permission.
The access is denied.
My heart isn't yours to
mock and ****.
I will rise like
the phoenix from
the ashes and sail on against
the azure sky, free and
untethered.
Resurrected
I'm back from the dead.

In the worst hour of the worst season
    of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking-they were both walking-north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
    He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
    Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
    There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
    Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and a woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.