Shake out your shining tresses, Love
Undress their dark contour as the pink stars rise
And drowse around the smoke-ringed moon,
Like roses in a whiskey glass.
Take time to dream a dream, my Love,
Tresses fallen across the curve of your face --
Sleep away the late summer moon,
Spooning the stars asleep in pink lace.

Lay down your weary bones, my dear,
Stretch out on vanilla feather-winged dreams 
My whisky rose petal kisses blown into the night
Finding you on glittered opalescent moonbeams
Grab hold of pink-starred sweet slumber
As  silken tendrils puddle upon your chest
Tangled up in each other's lithe limbs
Our blissful hearts beat together in tender rest

Je suis née éblouie par la ville des lumières
and grew up in a city that once couldn't sleep,
dazed by the lights, my whole life I fled from
a heritage I wasn't told I could keep.

Je suis née des trottoirs, des rues noueuses et sales
and grew up on a block which remained much cleaner
than my conscience because I remember seeing
through blue eyes a black man being clobbered for a
misdemeanor.

Je suis née dans un pays où les fleures se fanent
and grew up in a place where the flowers were fake,
a house where anything that wasn't of plastic
was soon tossed in the sky, left to plummet and break.

Je suis née à Paris
J'ai grandis à New York
Je mourrai, ailleurs

There's a storm in my mind it's awaiting
because the harp's hum is abating (softly,
softly; you only hear it now
that it is but a fading vow)
with the years; it seems like the intercept
read a promise that was stolen and couldn't be kept.
You lied, how you laid your lies with truth,
how the truth was lain and slain in lies,
how the trees burgeoned after you were gone
with blossoms like decaying wounds
i remember, I remember your sparkling words
words that unfolded their black wings like birds
and collapsed into the wind current, and unlatched,
and abruptly arose, wings rigid, propelled by your smile,
propelled by the thought that our characters matched,
only to buckle within the next mile.

I felt the premonition. I just couldn't accept
that your eyes were a promise stolen,
(as your conscience became swollen)
and what is stolen can never be kept.

No, no - I don't love you, lover, not quite,
Not in the way that I love this fair night.
The cyclic kingdom of a waxy moon
Reigns o'er the darkness like a sparkling spoon,
Ready to scoop up the mess that the Sun
Has caused in passing, its garments undone.
But this night, this lithe, obsidian fire,
Nurtures the cloudless cloak: somber pyre
Where those who blanket themselves go to burn.
And I, puerile flame, wait in prayer my turn
To be tucked in tightly 'n' sent off to bed
In that still place where the astres are wed.
Night is the time when my thoughts bathe in light,
When musky warmth wafts in without a fight,
When even the most stubborn dreamers yield
And the fear and the love in my heart are revealed.
No, I don't love you in that way, for
As much as I love Night, I love your eyes more.

Today I wrote a song about your teeth.
They are crooked and imperfect.
Just like this. Our hands. And these
songbirds are all liars. We haven’t learned.
Flesh memory is overrated. Last night
I felt the linen, and it whispered to me
nothing. Not even the shape of you
reminds me of happiness. What is the use
of these metaphors if they can’t
beautify you anymore. No longer as fierce
as the inferno I allowed you to become.
Drowning in bedclothes, trying to understand how streams of consciousness
are becoming bodies of water. Today
I wrote a song about your teeth. And I
read it aloud to the voiceless, and now
they know what love tastes like.