50 years ago, you and I couldn't hold hands in the street
and here we are checking into hotels, leaving secrets between sheets.

I would be a mullato,
foreigner,
alien.
The mixing of worlds and tones.
I'd be scared to walk down the road at night, or to bat an eye or take a breath or look twice
at the wrong man

You would be strong and proud and from the gentry,
drinking away the demons who have learned to love your poison,
using women like tissues,
breaking them like eggs.

And yet here we are, a clashing of worlds clinking our glasses, our bodies aching for one another behind table cloth