Can I offer you a drink
What'll it cost me
How bout a thought to think
What if it's lost on me

What do you want to do tonight?
I see myself in a bathrobe
With a tall glass of wine
And whiskey til the daylight

Looking for you
What else can I do
My heart is still lost
But its paid the cost
Of trusting your cover
And until I discover
More pain to numb this
I'll hold on to fake bliss

"You can have
A wonderful night
For the right price"
I told him
I just didn't know
It would cost me too

a nice muslim girl
Was the victim of her
Lovers ghost
The ghost of a Saudi
Prince
Whom loved her
And her the same
He committed suicide after
His beloved accused
Him of unspeakable acts
When ever
The girl slept
Her late lover
Would come from the
Darkest recesses of her mind
And appear in her nightmares
****** from the neck down
As he slit his own throat
Asking her why
She betrayed him
After the shared something special
He would haunt her in her nightmares as
****** Faisal
Or the arabian ghost
If you say ****** faisal
3 times
He will show up
In your nightmares
A tormented soul in the earth
And the hearafter

you are
priceless
capable of so much more
than just some being

being
mistreated

you are deserving of so much more
than what you are receiving
to witness the worst
is the worst
but continuing to inhabit
is robbing the
value
of life.

discomfort in fulfilling our hopes
hesitance in facing our fears
where do we draw the line
between living and being alive
if our actions speak louder than our words
how do we measure sound
in the face of death
why do we let her down
in knowing that we never settled
bets with our hearts
gambling our existence away
basing our worth in cards
dealt by someone else
concrete in our stubborn ways
when do we realize
changing habits has no price
yet the highest cost
but we still refuse to pay
for debts we acquire
and complain about the weather
until our bodies collapse

this title has begrudgingly waited for some loving kindness, fulfillment-needy, since October of Two Thousand and Seventeen

which is not quite as long as the decades I have been waiting to
accumulate the words to provide us both, an inspired solution

my days are numbered
in decades, decals, varying lengths of hair,
belts with notches that ain’t reachable,
suits various, both too big and too small to fit,
the who who used to own them,
begrudgingly, writes this

city born and bred, with the pale skin needed to prove my urbanity, each day came unto me begrudgingly,
even, especially, the good ones

when I was ten and rode my bike from freedom to mystery,
and back again in a city that was ok, if you stayed out of its way
and knew the city’s vocabulary and its erogenous zones

when nothing come easy, when even the easy, when it comes, comes begrudgingly

when you think of love, and the next immediate thought is:
how great the cost - recalling too well,
the pain of childbirth and child rearing
and the staining, paining fluid is in perm-attendence,
that doesn’t ever fully departs and
is not never entirely stain-stick-removable,
and the children come ‘n go according to their schedule,
someone else’s vast eternal plan

life in the same apartment  
where my parents died,
listening to the stories of joined lives,
listen to the sisters telling them
over and over to a stream of visitors
earned from and of a 98 year life,
given up willing but, begrudgingly as well.

the story-telling skill because of them,
my mist-matched parents who did ok
and their very best,
gifted us hyperbole innate genetic
and all of us now registered
tall tale tellers;

some write for a living,
some live to write,
some write to make themselves clearer,
after honestly confronting their subway reflection  

words acquired bot ‘n sold,
they too are stains unerasable,
very always handy,
the one thing we shared, word skill,
was never at loss, words never held a grudge
no matter how long they waited to serve

this fact, begrudgingly confess;
all my-word skill was freely inherited...
and I hope it satisfied the title
and you, those that waited patiently but,
begrudgingly

The Cost

“5 minutes to write, 5 minutes to edit and 10 more to cease weeping,”
when the inquiry arrives, how long/where from it comes,
gave this answer

more or less the response accurate
more or less the weeping really never ceases

I will return to it again, **** poem
random when, unreasoned why, wherefore
a stumble, a message, months from now, tomorrow,
even decades and I’ll remember the precise circumstances

for each poem has a Cost, that excises a piece of you, a new cut,
freshly salted, an antibiotic of loving may remove the
redness, but not the white line, so what you call a scar, I,
I call it an etched memory preserved

the sum of all These Costs, all these memories,
cumulative, additive, addictive - someone says:

stop being so sensitive, leave the telling to others,
or keep them in plastic bags, dated, retrievable,
in case an antiretroviral antidote is ever needed,
a fresh injection when you think you could even
cease to care

The Cost is always capitalized, for the Cost is called human capital,
the invisible financing that permits our existence till all spent,
when we’ve run out of drawer space, zipper bags,
breaths to be taken away and glass jars to store them,
if the mind says no more! then it will be ok,
for you are all spent

The Cost so great! this a double entendre,
for they are the stuff of me, whatever greatnesses
I ever possessed within them kept and believed,
happily paid for past and present, for the future,
will happily pay for it right now, again and again,
for the Costs are who I am, till, such time that
Costless arrives, eyes closed, nothing left to post,
to recall, no coin to give, my purposed all paid,

as if all paid could ever cause my weeping to cease


Mon May 4
10:48 am