I'd like to say, now that it's subday,
blessed be the ***** that slits red like the **** laced raven, my chest beats steady like the pulse of you, lily lime green and keen. I am yours.

I am your, mint lean, get to know me but never forget her, I am hers and your story folded over and mistaken.

i spend my days now counting til you, morning glory's cactii-ed to my tongue, goosebump ridden and hungry for some distant memory to bring me back down, if the early spring sun was to stop glowing, maybe that's be a start, but it beams innocence down my lungs and through the pours of my skin. Your eyes shine as though an angel lives between the thin realms of your mind and your soul and right there, inter-mixed between it all, I can't seem to help but hope to live, am I greedy enough now, because according to me, it's seems like this is all this is.

We don't speak.

We look into each other's eyes.

We don't nod.

We acknowledge each other's presence with silence and calm swarms along with it.

He fixes his tie and walks away.

We don't speak.

We don't speak.

We don't speak.

my bottom lip burns, middle chapped and spiced, I worry that my limbs aren't strong enough to bare what you've had and what you could have.

we keep the house cold
so that we can trace life
out of the puffs of clouds
that hum from our lips.
as he skates off the bed
feet nibbling
at the floor boards,
arms drizzling
past his waist,
he sits on the edge of the air
changing what filters into my lungs
with each yawn that stretches from him-
his pale back angled to my face, I
stretch my legs towards him,
resting my feet on his back,
toes tucking into the brails
of his spine,
and we wait within
the beauty of those ripe days,
when everything fell
on our swollen eyelids.

there are no clocks
in this room:
how do they
except me to know
when to leave
and when to stay

today i took a trip through the meadows to remind
myself of what the grace of auburn leaves felt like
to the pallet of my eyes.

I will be with you for as long as you will have me

because I am the kind of person
that forgives and forgets
all of my own sins
and never enough of your:
I swear to God nothing happened babe.
the chick's crazy.
excuses and so you went ahead and
left me though it should have been me
leaving and you staying,
I suppose we were both
just afraid of the same thing.
and so I forgot you though I
never really forgave you-
until I saw you with that crazy chick
at the market picking out orangish plums
and all you did was pretend not to see me
watching you and that crazy chick
pick out the same plums I had had for desert
just last night,
I suppose in that moment I forgave you,
if not just for my pitiful heart's sake.

i spilled black coffee down the barebones of your thighs and watched as the paleness of you blush into ruddy-ness. below, i watch the tarred remains of me that couldn't stick to you spread and sink into the earth.

i hate him because he's always
swimming around and thinking things
but he never says any of them.

the heart is a mirror that reflects nothing but organs

I'm
hanging on
to tomorrow.

All of my friends are sad and trade
shades of grey like women in department
stores do pants. They don't listen to my
jokes about foreign policy and humanism
versus feminism. They listen to the words
I say about him as they shut me in and then
out, the women, they don't really care.

never
trust
the wind
to be
straight
forward
with you.

it is as
fickle
as a
premature
heart.

we didn't mind our mistakes
like everyone else did.
he spelled his name wrong,
always and I sometimes.
He forgot key letters
slung his slang between
my tongue, pierced his
bottom lip, tatted
Breaking Babylon
across his chest, buzzed
his black hair low so that
his olive colored scalp
shone through,
scissored his black jeans into
shorts, lectured me on
his truths and my truths
and how our privilege
is self-evident, whispered
to me on cold cold nights
about the coming of the
Zion train and that either
Lauryn Hill or Nneka
would be it's conductor,
grew his hair down to his
shoulder when I
buzzed mine low revealing
my tight curls
and cursed his blossom
pink lips and prodded his
piercing with my thick
bottom lip and waited
and waited and waited.
He liked my mistakes
and my curiosity and I
liked his confidence
in his abilities. He didn't
cover his mistakes, he
was sure of them.
He told me the Zion
train would come the
day that I decided
to ask and still I
couldn't resist asking,
is your heart breaking?
and now he's telling me
he's missed me and that
it's good to hear from me
and that he's missed my
blue velvet voice, and I
have to bite my tongue
and nibble my fingers
to stop myself from
asking him,
is your heart still breaking?
but I know that I've
missed him more than I
enjoyed breaking his heart.
He likes my curiosity
and the mistakes that
come along with them.

I need to stop. Writing everything down on a piece of paper hoping that it'll wake. Everything out of me because all I end up losing is. Nothing. And I am so tired of finding my words thick like fondue glued to eyes.

you kiss me like I'm a blank page you're writing a new poem across my lips. each stroke of your tongue scripts another line.

We never truly wake from our nightmares. We simply open our eyes and hope that the light will chase our horrors away. it never really does. It just helps the sun cast shadows above them until it's dark enough for them to escape.

if I could count on my hands and toes the amount of times I've thought of you since waking, I'd medically, by practice and study be an anomaly. if I could show you all of the ways you've hurt me just by not seeing me, you'd have enough ammo to write me an album

give me a hole to crawl into

i am certain that i am going to die young and no this isn't one of my cries for help or bargain-ed pleas, you all will-i-am certain- miss that years and years from now. i still have myselves in all of you, every ounce of me does not belong to me. i am in ownership of nothing but the curls of my eyelashes and the frame they allow me to recreate. this is simply my attempt at a lightly humored poem, but I am certain I am going to die young, very young almost too young to remember the day I was born and thus, first deceived and devirginized, even before my first steps on clay coated sand and became a constantly budding plant with razor bladed sides and a thirsty black vaping hole between my legs but Liberia ruined me with it's talk of this ******* thing called womanhood same as they brought me thought and thought again to salvation, i am certain i am going to die just like many thought i've never lived a single day in my life, I am certain,
I am certain, I am certain.
I am. i am. just not tonight

and I often wonder
why I come back
to you like I do
when all you do
is get up
and leave
me like an
old wet towel
that's gotten
too many
stains and
rips and not
enough
fibers
for you to
use.

you're not as bright
as you typically are.
today you seem so dim.

my chest hangs over my knees and my head weighs heavy to the floor, I am slowly separating from my body, my limbs, my soul and my smile. and on the days you tell me to linger after not seeing you for years, I wonder how much longer you'd make me keep waiting while you continue to mingle.

tell me how you'd romance this stone as I lay unnerved by the wind of you. tell me how you'd keep my body cold and my mind warm as you hold me between yours fingers, tell me you'll love me til I die be it tomorrow or the next day, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me tell me that my lungs won't ache after you've skipped me across the pond to drown, tell me how it is you plan to romance this stone. and I swear I'll never leave you.

every once in a while i stay awake and dream of you.

half of the people that love me
don't like me enough to leave me
and I don't know what that says
about them or me other than that
they don't understand the way the
world should work, only how it does work and I hate them everyday
for not trying.

I can't say that I know exactly what you want from me at this very standstill, I'm trying to remember how to breathe you in without becoming enraptured in the thickcut essence of you but on a day like today when my confidence frays at the slightest quiver of your lips, I couldn't say what I'm most in a haze about, the idea that you see me or the fact that you so frequently forget me, but it doesn't hurt me, it doesn't.

the modern world will die from its careless intake of caffeine and they will go blind from feverish bliss

I've found a way to slip him into my bed, hidden between my sheets of smoke, blue beyond mountains and his words fray- a cigar burning lazy against my tongue.

"let him fall asleep between your lips," they say, "and when he wakes, feed him."

it's kinda funny and kinda scary
but I almost always expect him to saunter down from his apartment in his ripped jean jacket and dusty accent and say something snippy that I could translate a million and one ways depending on how insecure I was feeling that day and make me want to melt and cry all at once, but he never does. he never does.

are you ever afraid
that you won't fit
back into someone's
life like you used to

the first day I met you
I visited the store
and bought a new
journal. I wanted to
write you, so that I
could remember you in
script and in memory, I
wanted to have the chance
to be apart of your evolution,
I wanted to recreate you,
and scrawl you down through
the loops and curves of my words
I wanted to be apart of you in some
extended and intended with only well
regards, I wanted to write of you, freely
and openly, I wanted to write to you,
to make love to you, bleed ink over
white sheets, I wanted to write for you.

I throw lightbulbs at cellophane walls and watch as they bounce onto the floor and shatter across my feet, sparks lighting my feet and then resting right there, beneath me: apart of me.

Dear Dad,
When I was younger and I wrote you that letter explaining to you how much I hated myself sometimes.

When I wrote you that letter explaining to you how much I hated my skin

How much I hated my thoughts

How I lost all of my friends in the span of a month because I stopped trying to care

How much I just wanted to disappear

How much you'd be better off without me

How much it hurt all the time

When I showed you all of my poems

And you called my black tears on those ******* white papers 'talent' and ignored my cries

When you insisted that I was okay when I tried to explain to you that I wasn't

Did you really believe that I would be okay or did you just need me to be?

I'm not mad anymore. I just want you hug me and tell me you love me and just stop ******* hating me

"Oh, your gaze is dangerous"

sometimes I think you hate me. the way you cut your words at the end making sure they jab, sometimes I think you hate me,
the way you walk away as quickly as you came, sometimes I think you hate me the way you level your eyes on every inch of my body but my eyes, sometimes I think you hate me more than you could ever love me and then you kiss me until I'm left with no memories to rely on, sometimes I think you love me and then you go and leave me

I never really understood how I coukd crave and understand anymore like I do you.

am I not nice enough