I am a woman of layers
To say I am onion would be perhaps incorrect
I am more so a cake
Of batter and wear,
Frosting and knee stings,
Chocolate dark skin,
Milky light dreams
And,
I also have the cake.

I've forgotten how to feel sadness and I thank God
I've forgotten the tremors you made me feel
And the reverberations of your forced body into mine
I've forgotten my mother's glazed eyes when I told her the three unspeakable words: "I was *****"
It all seems like a memory now
Yet I can't hear or taste or read the word "****"
They say language breaks down barriers
And in this case it is the barrier to the flood of emotions that stay tightly coiled in a black box in the base of my body
I couldn't tell you whether it's floating along my blood stream
Or scraping the insides of my uvula
All I know is that when this language is learned,
I. WILL. BREAK.
I think I will break.
But then again I have God. And I am okay again.
I can face the day again.
The day God leads me to the steps of the Tower of Babel and I reach the highest point of my gloom
Let's pray I'll be able to bear it.

The tenderness as they described it is circumnavigating more than the ******* and the roundness of my protruding *******
Perhaps by tenderness of the breast, what they really mean is tenderness of the soul and the emotions one hurriedly tucks under the crevices of their *****
If one imagines how ******* are anything but tender, with their ferocity of nurturing life and their wholly encompassing nature to weigh and weigh and weigh
Weight carried by a mother,
Shed off by her daughter,
Caressed by the one she lies with in the crevice of her soul and the gap between twin XL bunk beds and walls full of picture of people who no longer weigh her down
It's the feeling of nostalgia and nostalgia feeling this tenderness growing from one's *******.
Growth of the ***** of life as a life imagined is destroyed, nullified, kaput.
But most of all she feels nostalgia.
Nostalgia for the people whose tenderness she felt,
Nostalgia yes for her brother and grandmother cloaked in love around her neck like crystals from an iridescent silver clasp

These past few days I've felt a solitude that's beautiful
I no longer long for you
The words you said never haunt me, not even slightly
My only reminiscence of you, is that you existed to teach me a lesson
When I hear your name I no longer feel pain,
When mistakenly or unmistakenly I glimpse the last words you wrote to me, I no longer feel the strong chord that connected me to you. The cord that longed for me to text you, call you, feel you.
It feels like a broken telephone. The same game we played when we were five. Remember that?
Miscommunication, broken tales, it all led to a happy ending. Or atleast, I'm happy now.
I've finally disconnected this call.

The reflection that looks back at me isn't mine
I see a girl with wiry black hair
It's not mine, I bought it at a weave shop.
The lines that bend around my hips and under my stomach, well they're not mine, they didn't belong to me two or three years ago when things were safe and food wasn't made for comfort.
I see heavy bags anchoring fatigue and lost nights of restless searching for connection and dependence lining my eyes much like the kohl that circles my eyelashes. Well those I got from the beauty store and in the former situation, the LACK of the beauty store.
I hide myself in makeup as I search for attention. The attention of the personified "it" girl.
The reflection I see is of the wanna be "it" girl.
Instead the only thing that's mine, is my imperfect perfectness, or so I have failed to see it.

How low is low
Have I found no other high but in guys
Have I stooped to the ground and below
Where do I stop, when will I say no

My insecurities lead me to this road
It is only countless times that I have journeyed here
How can I let him hurt me
How can I let them hurt me

Do I not know my worth?
A woman's worth?
Don’t you know that you are courageous and beautiful and intelligent and the sweetest of your kind
Don't you know the power you hold over men?
Don't you remember the strength in your smile?

Just because of one person, it easily fades away
Blindly you see no good in yourself
Insecurities, insecurities, countless insecurities.
You are good enough. You are beautiful enough.
Your lips are tender, you eyes are deep as an ocean's blue yet they are brown
Why do you let this one person take this all away?

Because at this time, in this day. Nothing else seems to matter
Just how you weren't sufficient to one person
How you aren't good enough
How you will never be good enough.

And the words continue to fade away
Until you're left with nothing. Words with no meaning, a body with no meaning.

Emptiness.

I've had a yearning for gray
The forbidden color, intertwining between the cells of opaque and milky protoplasm
The color consumed me before he had even realized it
That night in the back seat of his car,
My "ebony" thighs and legs wrapped around his pearly waist
I pulled him down,
Past the slavery and the whippings and beatings
He went deeper and saw the faces people gave because of the color of my skin
From my neck down to the Drinking Gourd he kissed, following the path of darkness and fear
He freed me
He accepted me
We were gray, two heaving bodies contrasting like darkness and light

The sun blazed in the moon until the two were intertwined

My heart is light
Yet the corners and grooves of its surface are being pulled
And the heaviness is weighing me down
To release
To remove the chains and locks that connected me to you
You will be like a ship far from its harbor to me
I am no longer harboring feelings of sadness or anger, memories, tears, walls and your scent.
That's just it, I am no longer harboring any part of you.
I am an ocean
A deep wide ocean who's waters don't need to be calmed,
Who's engulfing spirit will never need your buoy
For so long I longed for the touch of my waves to your sand
Until I realized, why does the ocean NEED the sand?
To think of the greatness of ocean waters uncontrolled by the hindrance that is the sand, is to bestow the waters of their full potential
To bring grainy feelings into what was once clear.
To avoid the bodies of drowning children, soda-canned-suffocated sea gulls, oil spilling tanks,
because you see,
all of these came from the sand.
And before the sand,
How the Ocean lived with peace because of its deep, wide, engulfing spirit

I'm waiting for you to tread on my heart like a horse galloping on freshly fallen snow
Beneath that bed of snow is the encased hardened shell of ice that you will form from my heart
This is worse than a ticking time bomb
Or the sight of the last grains of salt falling from an hour glass
Because at least with those, you can see the dangers
You know that when the bomb explodes you will be wrecked, your body will be mangled, your home will be uprooted
Once the hour glass is half empty your time will have ended, your results will be half-assed showing that it's too late, your efforts were fruitless
But with you as you tread on my ice shell of a heart, I do not know what will happen when you finally pierce through
I do not know if the rapture will cause an earthquake beginning from my chest and spreading to my toe and finger tips
I do not know if I will lose the ability to breath seeing as the heart and lungs only live momentarily without each other
I do not know if you will break me and break me and break me as all of the others have done with the magnanimity and force of a thousand bombs all being counted to their last second by a thousand hour glasses
I do not know if your love will penetrate painfully through me like a horse walking on a fresh bed of snow
Only to find holes and holes blanketed with snow to fall into
And disappear.

This is the story of a Foolish Fledgling

I feel the silent vibration of pain and remorse tracing my ribs to my navel and swooping to encompass the silence that lingers over my mouth
This emptiness that I am feeling was because you felt grief
Because at one point I remember you and I
Well, we were inseparable, we were one
How did we let this come so far?
Or rather how did I let the cage that held our two harmoniously beating hearts shatter and break, letting the birds of rage and anger and animosity and fear and anger and anger and anger, free?
But I wouldn't say they were free because the heavy locks that weigh down my heart now,  show me that perhaps the birds are cascading down, so close to death
And that is why I am silent
Because we came this close to losing each other
This close to killing the love we once had for each other
The love I still have for you now
And for so long I was convinced that you no longer cared for me
I felt you no longer could see the greatness you had once seen in me
If I flew, you would always find error in how close I flew to the sun
Always chastising me and warning that the sun would burn me
Yet to me the sun is what felt good, what made me feel beautiful
For the sun, unlike you, illuminated my feathers and helped me see the strength in my wings
But as I fell, I fell far away from you.
Today you gave up and said you were ready to push me away
And only provide me with the seeds that would nourish my weak body
When all I yearned for was your embrace once again in the nest of your heart that I had called home.
As I fell, it was only until then, when you were no longer willing to catch me, that I realized that you had been there all this time *ready to catch me
Ready to embrace me into your nest but *I had pushed you away
I flew to the sun and you tried you tried you tried
To call your fledgling back into your arms
And foolishly I flew directly towards the sun who scorched my wings and only led me further away from you
And as I sit here close to the bottom of the pit
With wings broken
Heart recoiled from yours
I long once again for the nest that was your heart.
I long for me when I was easy and simple and only fed from the worms that you gave me
When I did not go out into the world to search for my own
Foolishly, oh so foolishly.
As I crawl back towards the cage
The cage that locked in our hearts together
Away from the world and its temptations, away from the scorching sun,
I pray that my minor pecks at your nest do not go unanswered
For I am sorry I am sorry I am sorry
For there is no love like the one I once knew before I broke this cage
I long to be nestled in your love.

Inflating
It’s growing and pulsating
With every angered shriek and hurtful outburst
The hideous words echoing in the room
Retaliation after retaliation
What is peace in a household?
What is happiness in a marriage?
Words of cops and lawsuits
Disrespect and money
I’m not really sure “where the love” is anymore
Can the Black Eyed Peas darken my eyes so I cannot see my parents committing this crime
A sin of a fairytale broken
Reality tokens
All in this gambling game of marriage
Except there is no winning, no giving up
Only losing
Losing love, losing hope, losing peace
It’s growing and pulsating
This ache inside my head from the echoes on the walls
It’s inflating
Maybe that’s why my forehead is so large
Just reactions of overthinking

Have you ever heard of a woman so strong she could be David's daughter
So wise, King Solomon was surely her instructor?
Have you ever felt more joy than Noah at the sight of his doves' fig tree
Or happy as Mary was when she looked down at her blessing from above?
This is to me, my mother

Have you ever been shown love and compassion mirroring Mother Theresa's grace
Or joined with someone in pure merry and bliss as Kenyans were when the United States elected Obama?
Have you ever received endless love and support from a woman who grew up with so little?
Have you ever thought to yourself, as God blessed the people of Jerusalem with a Star, you have been blessed with one shinning bright one?
This is my mother.

Have you ever felt that there was only one person in the world who would truly be there for you at the end of the day?
Have you ever felt that God truly loves you because the possibilities of not having not only a mother, but this mother in your life are unfathomable?
Have you ever felt speechless and wordless towards the love and grace just one person has shown you?
Have you ever felt engulfed in a sea of God's gift...God's light?

You have never felt this way unless you have met my mother
God's blessings sometimes stuns us.
I believe my biggest surprise is the love He showed me by giving me someone like you.

Occasionally I feel a gloom so wrapped in emotion and fear and apprehension
Of the future
Of myself
I get strong and build myself with bricks of lace
My stomach turns
I feel wrapped up in laces of pain
I am robed in loneliness
My flats solidify every ounce of happiness and turned them into mushed grapes of deep existence
Perhaps the most lonely times are those when you know who loves you somehow yet still feel that it isn't enough
It is what tightens the cord on my robe
I let the gold ensnare my already knotted insides
Perhaps from running away from my problems I'm just creating an even bigger ball of twisted emotions
A type of lukewarm germ throbbing in the pit of my stomach
My fingers can't feel it
My body feels weighed down
Grieved down
Oh how I put on a persona of happiness
But I really am happy
God has given me so much
I dislike that I feel this
Yet don't feel anything at the same time
I hate that sentence. So emotionless
Never leave me wrap yourself around my robe
Hold me in the fetal position and never break the umbilical cord that ties me to you
Never leave me like they all do
Eventually I lose myself
I am never what they want
I **** the magic
Magic killer
The pain the solemn knowing that you are alone yet surrounded by loved ones

One broke her,
Into thin fibers of glass disarranging a once whole vase
A beautiful vase, multifaceted and covered in ornate beauty
Intricate, delicate, carefully carved
A whole vase, filled to the brim with life and love
But what does love look like? She knows not anymore.

Two found the vase in ruins,
picked up her pieces, mended her and held on to her afraid she would break once more
Carefully, protectively she now lived.
Given everything, someone who had mended her.
Yet she still felt a sense of a missing piece
A gap, a hole, a missing fragile piece, unfilled but by One who had broken her

Why does she love One who hurt her, who broke her who left her unfilled?
Two many times has he mended her back together
Yet One is still the missing piece, the gap, the hole, the Vase

I'm in my bed half warm with the other half as cold as this solemnity you've left me in
I have one leg wrapped around the sheets where you formally lied and the other hanging like the pieces of my mangled heart
Struggling to maintain equilibrium or tumble past sheets of broken lies into the crevice of my untold truths right under my bed
The rain pours as if forcing itself down my rib cage to remind me that I'm alive despite my mangled body in it's contorted position without it's straightener of you
The rain it pours yet I can't hear it
I hear the silence
And I feel you once again feeling my skin from hip bone to the depth of the rivers inside me
Running your fingers on my African canvas with your Southern confederate rakes and flags etching yourself onto me
Leaving me scarred
Until every time I look down at me, I see you
Oh the irony
The tale of white man leaves his African prey once again.

When I see your smile
The lips that curl back to reveal those perfectly shaped crescent whites
My soul reverberates
I can't stop looking at you from jawline until my eyes scale up to your beautiful brown eyes where we meet once again
I'm speechless
My hands entangled in the beautifully locked mane that is your hair
And our legs intertwined like trees just gathering their branches
You see you and I
After every visit
Every time your body lovingly caresses mine
Every laugh
And every story
We grow our tree not on our backs but from my feet upwards until the day the leaves will ascend from my heart and I will say "I do"
You see you and I, we are little seedlings just awaiting to bud
You planted the first seed with your calm demeanor, your kisses grew a branch, but once I knew you, I finally saw that we were growing a tree
Oh how I will continue to water your branches