How can one be that obsessed with someone?
How could anyone in the whole world wake up one day
With the eagerness to see just one face for the rest of their life?
How could anyone grab oranges and not even think of eating them as soon as they touch their hands
Because they can’t think of anything else but getting home to share them with someone?
How, how, how?

Why do I feel like the sun is not bright enough if I don’t get to see your smile?
Why does chocolate taste like charcoal when I’m not eating it with you?
And why do I go out of my way to have the pillow always ready for your head,
Because I’m scared your thoughts might drift away and lie to your face about how beautiful you are?
Why, why, why?

What is it that makes me want to write you poems,
Even when the alphabet of my life is missing the letters y, o, and u?
What is it that screams at me to wash your shoes,
When mine look like dirt was made for them?
What is it that runs through my veins every time the stars you call eyes
Look through the cloth I call soul?
And I know it’s more than blood, and I know it’s more than love.

My love, how can someone beg for you
In the middle of the night, between the sheets of a broken work of art?
My Lord, how can someone love with such clouds and lilies in the park,
And chamomile tea in the morning, while you fill up my heart?

There’s something about the black woman in I.

There’s something about the Black woman in I that I can’t figure out.
And there was a time where I spent my days basking in this not knowing situation.
A time when I blamed the men and women around me—
The people who couldn’t see what I wanted them to see but…
How would they see what I can’t?

I kept crying about how disrespectful ****** were to me,
How the women around me didn’t understand the feeling of not feeling enough,
How I blamed myself for everything that was happening because of me.
And yes,
If it was because of me,
Then I am at fault
And should blame myself for it.
But the picture is bigger than that.
It’s tougher than that.
It’s darker than that.

A few years later,
There’s still something about the Black woman in I that I can’t figure out.

Always complacent.
Always trying to be soft after a life of being the hardest rock.
Always trying to be mellow jazz when I was the heaviest metal.
Always trying to be touched like a piano,
But I kept on being the drums.

I’m still my own weakness, you know?
Now I’m not lying to anyone—
I’m just lying to myself.
I walk in this made-up power that I’m supposed to have,
And I built a whole bridge out of it… but it always trembles.

    “You’re so beautiful for being a Black woman.”
    It trembles.
    “Oh, you’re so well-spoken for coming from the hood!”
    It trembles.
    “Are you sure you didn’t have any help making this?”
    It trembles.
    “You’ll never be like her.”
    And it trembles.

Still, I keep walking over that bridge because—
I need to fake it until I make it, right?
I’m so tired of faking it.
I’m so tired of feeling this way.
I’m tired of being policed over my blackness,
Over my hair and my body,
Over my womanhood and my mind,
Over my sad little soul.
Still, I keep going through it,
In the hopes that I find what I want to find in the end.

    “Oh, what do you want to find?”

…

Oh, dear heart.
We were supposed to walk on lilies and green grass.
I’m sorry that we can’t.

Eight years later,
There’s something about the black woman in I that I still can’t figure out.
And just like before…

I never will.