i never used to smoke
but since you left,
it’s the only time i can seem to breathe

I looked up at the stars twinkling in the midnight sky
Smiled
Looked at him
"they remind me of my eyes the first time I saw you!"
I said with the sweetest smile on my face
He said nothing..
I asked him "wassup".. then
Noticed his eyes shivering
His cold heart was reminding him
Of each person he ever put a little piece of his heart in
Then took it with them to their death bed
His mind never seemed to rest easy when we stargazed
He said "baby
You over here ooh-ing and awe-ing over lights in the sky
While we surrounded by falling stars"
I could hear the unhealed scars in his heart
When he spoke
You could see the burn and twinkle in his eyes like fireflies
If only I could trap it in a jar the same way
Ease his pain
Kisses and I love you's were never enough
He believed he had to be tough
To run from his rough past
He came a long way
but ran the wrong way
shutting doors on every person who came his way
so he could have more room for harms-way
Because he knew the feeling of being shut out too
Shut out of heaven or hell's doors
Or in his words "wherever real ****** go when they die"
Everything he ever loved walked in and never came back
And as many times as he knocked
Those doors never opened for him
Those shores never swept him
Yet his mind was always lost
At "see what I mean, this life wasn't made for us"
..I wish he didn't believe it
His smile so precious
His mind so ambitious
His love so priceless
I wrote this poem to tell him that
Dirt in his mouth will never taste anything like the dinners I cook for him
and even on his good days, there will always be darkness
Calling for him

We are the roaches of men
They treat me like the left overs..
burnt and small..
Roaches...
crawling from the cracks
of ghettos
waiting for extermination..
But we just multiply rapidly
hard shells of soft skin..
that bullets constantly find...
they call it enforcement..
We call it fear...
negrophobia...
they are afraid of our skin..
The power behind our beings..
They look at us as sin
We are the Roaches of men
unwanted house guest
feeling their
Entomophobia...
Creating more and more traps
for us to fall in..
Stomping our pride
with their steel boots...
Once upon a time
they could never **** our minds...
But they've found new forms of poisons
That have burnt us down
to smoking ourselves...
constantly...
as if is normal to see a young black mans
skin leaking smoke from the holes in his chest..
the smells of burning flesh..
that once swung from branches
in the southern sun.
Strange fruits to...Weeds... to roaches..
I bet they'll test
the theory of survival..
when they nuke us..
You 'know roaches don't say much...
they just create a lot of scatter..
but they create louder sounds together
and we can't even stand united
so our voices will never be heard..
just left in ash trays awaiting disposal..
as the stench or our smoking silence lingers in the air..
When will our dying embers once again catch flame
and burn away this despair..
we are stronger than memories
denser than air..
we are Power
Surviving long after the many times
we were suppose to be extinct....
Choices of Strength..
that we need to find again
We are the Roaches of Men...

Boys
Ask me
Why I can’t cook
And keep a house
And I tell them
My mother
Spent my childhood
Teaching me
What it meant
To be a bigger
Man than
Even they
Learned to be

Some of us live in love for the moment
and like frank ocean some of us think so far ahead that our intentions turn into misconceptions,
Flowers could never define his love because he finds no drive to meet that desire of mine
His garden is the bush in his pants and he encourages me to go down and smell the roses..
But I'm still not impressed
yet I'm still undressed,
He's confused like why can't you just take what you can get
And every simple question I ask gets put into this label of complaining
..I've never been seen as a crybaby til' my heart met you
People change, although, I think this is no phase
Because sunshine days have turned to rain
You give me pain as a gift and my expectations from you have been tainted so badly that as long as you cover it up with a kiss and a smile my heart will flutter and I won't be able to hold my tongue from saying that I love you
I can't say that I'm lost because I know exactly where I am
I was raised knowing that all these thugs were supposed to be heart breakers so when I came across the idea of you.. You told me you could give me something different, and I believed you
I had never been loved so selfishly and I fell in love with that..