After school in summer. An abandoned railway line, through a forest. A grey dress with red flowers on, the blue cardigan with sweat patches under the arms. Trying to conceal them. Not caring after a while. Walking in front, through the wild garlic. Not everything flourishing, some ******* here and there. The muddy ***** up to the track. Scrambling up trying not to get hands muddy, trying not to fall. Probably wearing impractical shoes. She was behind me, beside me. Catching her smell, trying to touch her hand, her shoulder. Talking about things that meant nothing but flowed: began and concluded satisfactorily. Only 17, so long ago. No doubt we talked of school, I don’t remember a word. It was the action, the structure of our communication, that was all I had. The unsaid was still sacred then. Reaching the end of the line. The line! It was a beautiful day, romanticized now. Warm in the sun and chill in the shade but I soon discarded temperature. The green from the trees came up from each side of the line and joined together at the top. The sun soaked through every visible article. All, except from the wall at the end that closed off the tunnel.

The space we were in did not exist to anyone else, no one was there, and no one had ever been there since we arrived. Vacuum packed world of complete perfection, apart from the mud, and the *******. But that was ok. The wall was black and heavy and cold. Near the top there was a hole. A square hole had been left or made through the ancient bricks, something forgotten maybe? Or to serve some forgotten purpose? I saw a challenger. The hole said ‘If you beat me you can have her’. It was not sinister. That did not exist.

Again I stood in front. ‘Bet I can get a stone into that hole!’ 15 feet perhaps or maybe only 8. Her eyes were on me: I desperately hoped they were. The whole of the back of my body took them in, I lit up with the warmth and the look. I would like to say it took only three attempts, that seems unlikely. What was she thinking? Was she looking on at the hole or at me? Heaven forbid she was looking at neither. I picked up stone after stone. They varied in size, feel, and dirtiness. I was an excellent thrower. I could throw a javelin, a ball, a boy; I adored my skill. My exuberance and elation guaranteed success. This was not a day for losing. Not while I could sift out the anomalies and incompatibilities without pain. There wouldn’t be a losing day until I understood that I did not yet know me.

The moment I succeeded in my challenge the celebration could begin. The rock perhaps made a sound as it tumbled down the inside of the wall but I did not hear. All my senses were now hers. Absorbed, obsessed. I was now permitted to turn around; to accept the look of admiration, or more. It was joy, certainly. Utter, complete joy. In skipping towards her she offered me her arms…… What words are given to unqualified human happiness? Getting more than you hoped for is even beyond that.

Not a day goes by
that I don’t wish
I could have been what you wanted.

I wasn’t Monogamy
or Hierarchy,
but I wasn’t casual either.

No, I loved you,
all of you, each of you,
with all that I was.

I shared secrets,
my dreams, my soul,
but with many.

It still hurts
knowing you loved an idea
when I loved you for you.

I die inside
remembering your pain
even if it was inevitable.

For no one
should have to pretend in love
or live a lie.

You were beautiful,
you still are,
our incompatibilities aside.

Forgive me, loves,
for loving in the plural
and breaking all our hearts.

Pericles exposes: "Content of enchantment I receive your gift, arts, letters where you have to visit a sacred replied that I have made here in the Empyrium, here the Republic will boast of ancient theaters by the hand of Phidias that you will have entrusted to you. Our north has been traced in this replica of the Acropolis or Parthenon, which awaits us in the long chain of Colargos. Behold, I have resumed the descendants that live behind the lion's hooks, and of your name Strategoi whom I have acclaimed to see you perceive you more than silence from those who never knew of your prowess, and your incidence of Gaugamela and Delphi, you must to know that huge Lepidoptera brought me your messages every day of unknown liturgy that I only expected after your investiture, and then to be received here together with Themistocles, that the vulnerabilities would never revert to the disadvantage of Greece because the safeguard of interest is to beat up our surrounded land, not land and sea; but of famous Hoplites who are the ones who have contained the edges of each border, but not of the Areopagus where I had to see you in your Ekklesia or assembly and classicism insult that succumbed with the interference of the Achaemenides. Nothing will I dare to be equal to when redoing or undoing what memory only has to stick to my science, but what do my hands think more than the same thing I did or shouldn't have done...? We are guarantors of our solace and mendicant stay here where you have been privileged to be brought by your Mashiach, and by me for all the declined attempts or opposite that you see in the Sun with his wealth; and all that we have been able to recover from its insignificant parts of those fleeting flashes of democracy, in the Micro Empyrean I have also duplicated the marble that does not compare to Oenidea in the Gulf of Corinth, or of resolved ideas to face in the Peloponnese. There I could see that I could never observe you if someone had recruited you because he had no advice or formats of your existence to bring you. Your storms were already propelling you over the skies of Greece, where there was never time and space that was denied to you, but who belongs to the chroniclers who did not know you until you propelled your Parapsychologies with your Corinthian helmet, and the pompous Light that expanded when they cut the flanks of the world with your Xiphos. What incompatibilities could be added to this old discernment, by tomorrow you will be back on Patmos, and I could clear you from a ministerial or skillful congressional decree to highlight the contentious bodies that want to join all of Greece, with more life than they have fallen and take advantage of its heritage. Perchance a phoro or tax, which relieves the girdling of a mandate that runs with the same vigor of your steed to take it to its bare sender.

The sacred wars have given you the approval that is sensed in the oracles of the world, more than the edicts of a sporadic Apocalypse that will be reversed in the Kassotides. And that the oracles will be invisible particles that file and distill what tends to extinguish a conservative policy and maintenance of the kingdom that survives here in the empyrean. Namely and officially, all the depths of our ocean will never be able to cover up what the owners of their appearance or betrayal will merit to cower by hitting each other's elbows. My fleet will have great limits to take beyond the imaginable with your garments and virtues, as Sóter or Strategoi that vindicates the self-revelation of crushing with politics an alliance that is managed by a will governed by the real sense of Will spread further afield than any personal interest. At the bottom of the treasury, you will find an Acropolis with its priestess canephora and basket full of delicacies, subordinated to a treasury that pours on all the roofs of Greece the profits that will spread everywhere to your new abode, far from the antagonistic factions that, although they show a toast at sunset with your glasses full of must from your servant Pericles. I am and will be a witness that I will deny or that nothing and no one can deny you, because you are part of Hellas, where it's packed rattles roar that will bring bleating and screams of Prometheus, due to such immensity of a Greece that also abounds in the Divine Heaven.
Stay away from Hetaira and Aspasia, otherwise, they could unseat you from your purged being, which can confuse hunger with the icy frenzy of your human impulses, more than the Lacedaemonian wielders who fight for your skinned serge, for new accounts to surrender to otherness with Alcibiades if you find yourself near any wasteland here in the Empyrean. Already the fertilized land of Demeter is proof of a slip of flower clusters that have become encysted in Persephone's locks, and that it is already Equinox! The winds are strongest at more than seventy centimeters from the sheaf that brushes your hands, they are more ferocious if it is that the skies that fall before your eyes when they are more dependent on land, which has an intractable dry well of fewer than seventy centimeters…!

I will donate the Parthenon to you, the harvest and the gracious gesture of it will not tire of your determination to surrender to its perfection so that it may be optimized. On the present day of 323 B.C. C. the ashes of Alexander the Great of Macedonia fall into our hands, and Vernarth his commander, together with my fleets of thousands and thousands of Syntagmas, with the allegory of Camels and cowbells, will take your sheep together to your Kafersesuh or manger that only has a promiscuous thirst for brave odors of piety, if it is from the plausible future to write everything that I have told you today of the Duoverse on a puny Ostracon, writing your obsequies of what I will have to exile to the border of the sooty Angels so they don't have to intimidate you. All the lands belong to you and plead for your guardians, who in the hour of your departure have fled farther from the entangled leaders. Today I have addressed, and I have harangued you, leaving to your possession my own pecuniary, and duty of Hegemon that I would leave no one else from the Kathartyrium, and pecuniary so that they promote you with my purging bordering on your celebrity by enlightening me in the Stars of Athens "

At the culmination of the course, when he let go of the Mashiach's hand, Vernarth dropped from a strong and fast scene of Othónes or screens, which made him fall to a vacant farmhouse called amphiprostyles; with porticoes and snowy columns that made him green at his feet and above all his will that was preparing for the Opistho that precisely protected his Energeia of rest, which was his great treasure that will carry him through all the ages, times, spaces and galaxies of the which with his gnosis could accumulate it from the God of all who goes more to the other side of the divinity, who can be contained in a mural in which the entire universe goes to embed itself of all physical and material forms, here is the philosophy of a Universal man that appeared with great similarity to the scattered spaces of Parapsychology instilled by the conspicuous Parerga and Paralipomena; of which he vindicates his versar by saying that intelligence is not capable of monopolizing more than the ego itself that cannot stand itself, for this reason that in his collection on the shelf of this space he places it next to the hybrid booklet of Messolonghi's Koumeterium, on this versed metaphysics here not degraded of the minimum parts, adorning them with the largest microparticles of what is made up in murky and intermittent beats of the unviable of the soul, and etheric body that would now sustain it. The reason for these inclusions were supplements, and quilts that will be put in the universe to rest with this work. The soul of this mission would be read by the most daring professor decipherer…, The Messiah! that lay on the slopes of the Talamí river, or paths of leaves through this river of leaves that carried all the parchments of books from the creative world, of which these will be randomly in the ascending areas that traveled on this selected *****, and later they will be read by the Messiah and Vernarth. The generalization of this celestial philosophy was summarized in booklets that were growing, whose reality surpassed the unreal, making it the most evident stratum of a posthumous theory, and discernment that promotes the paths of the Opistodomos of the Talami universe, and its leaves that bring riches of all the literary works, architectural musicals and all art that is enrolled in the science of its unmistakable reality with the same presence of all the worshipers of Liberty from where its primary sanctified origin is born, more than any treaty of a work that should go through all the static of the world being able to do what they deserve by having in their hands the same book Schopenhauer's Parerga that sustains the entire world, and Vernarth that maintains the Universe of fusion called Duoverse with the exclaimed doctrine breaking the inertia and static of what reality becomes before your Being, of what is present is of any dimension of the body and its existential relativity. Of all that it cogitates or not, it could be individualized and alternate with the freedom that the object thinks by itself. In this evanescent instant, the aerial masses of the internal warm air of the Iridescent Nimbus addressed the absorption of the sapphic limit of the Opistodomos, in such a way that the words could have verses that could be long and short as a single in the womb of everything created..., The universe has been dismantled on its own implied, however, it folds…! That from the remains of your soul wounded in occasional disasters revives because what you saw is the light of heaven. In this way, the sapphic element swirled above everything that was not holistic, which was only going to collapse on the ground of ignorance that was beginning to rebuild itself. The obvious explicitness made all the beauty in the world fleeting and ephemeral, but Vernarth recomposed it with the seeds of the Talami leaves, and the garrulousness of the tributary of flax leaves and pasted leaves of wisdom that ran through the nominal and famous matte, wide and short.

The witness sits waiting
as he walks in, briefcase in hand,
the table lined with lawyers.
He sits, puts down a tablet and pen,
asks for the witness to be sworn in,
and begins.
The pecking order is established.
The questioner is boss
and all embark on the train of
his thought.
'Would you recount for us
the circumstances leading up to
the incident.'
She begins one more time
to recount thoughts and impressions,
superimposed on
dimly recollected facts
whose keen edges
have long dissolved.
Her preparation is as apparent
as a painted door
over the threshold of
the truth.
'You have taken an oath',
he reminds her,
but the lock on the door
clicks shut.
Carefully, then, he makes a small incision
in the web
of aggregated incompatibilities,
and the abscess behind
exudes a purulent glow
through cracks only apparent
to him.
Her lawyer blusters and roars,
attempting to blow out the flickering flame.
But the cover is cleft,
and enough of the truth can be seen
to tip the scale.

One.
I used to write about my ex a lot. *** so hot I was surprised when our lust ran out of steam.
Then you came, *** could not compare to the explosives of two fire signs detonating, but it was good enough to warm me up, to work up a sweat, to quench my thirst, make me think maybe not the best but **** I’ve had worse. Interestingly the compatibility and probability of a Capricorn man and Leo woman working was extremely low but I was determined to make this work if anything just as a big ******* to astrology. Always the pyromaniac, I was relieved and excited to feel flames again. To feel those sparks to get my ink pen flowing hot lava across the page, but why does it have to derive from pain? My love, I was happy to love you. Oblige you.
Keep you. Bask you in the depths of my love and hoped you came out clean. Every time I love,
I love a little deeper, a little bit more womanly, a little bit more openly, flowing - my love I did not mean to drown you. I should have let you.

Two.
April 28th. I wasn’t going to go on that first date with you. It was personally too late into the night for my liking but it fit into your schedule perfectly. I should have taken this as a sign that I would be doing most of the sacrifices and compromises. You wanted to impress me so you agreed to play pool, a game you would lose and afterwards we sat in your car and had a fire conversation. As you poured a little of yourself onto me, I could not help but notice the street lights illuminate your brown sugar face and the stars ***** dance at the vibrations of your laughter. The night was chilly but in the car our dialogue kept me warm and cozy. For a date that I wasn’t about to show up for, I didn’t want to leave. I just wanted to commemorate the anniversary of our first date with you. To celebrate the love that you said singed for me, for it to be a testament that we made it through this year barely unscathed. Most of the scars were mine.

Three.
The Bluetooth speaker that you got me for my birthday.The yellow and black checkered Vans that I wore to the Eagles and Steelers preseason game, though I have deleted the pictures with you off of Instagram. It was during that game when you got mad at me for jokingly agreeing with the girl sitting beside you that the Steelers rookie QB was hot, that I saw the honeymoon phase smear right off of your face. Who you pretended to be and who I tried to compromise myself to become began to smolder underneath the heat of the August sun, our incompatibilities started to ring volumes; we didn’t have *** enough, we argued too much and it never resulted with our clothes off and our bodies touching, just me driving home angrily and sleeping alone, this camp fire blazed brightly and blew out quickly. Every time we tried to reignite it, it would blow out just as fast, frustratingly, it is my fault for ignoring such a weak connection.

Four.
The iPad that you got me for Christmas. After you opened up the gifts that I bought you, real round and heavy tears ran down your face and caressed my shoulder. We embraced so tightly, so lovingly, it was the most intimate and honest moment we shared. In that moment I knew that you never was really loved, really cared for by many women so I was determined to be that woman for you. I was so dead set on not breaking your heart like your ex girlfriend that I paid no regard to what was happening to mine. Over time, I could empathize why your ex girlfriend cheated on you. She decided on the things that she wasn’t going to let you take, she knew when to let that go, when to release if it was only for a quick relief, a guilty reprieve, so yeah maybe it’s you and has always been you.


Five.
The Nintendo Switch that you got me for Valentines Day. Maybe I can give it back if that was supposed to be some type of foreshadowing for how you would switch up on me, the painting with a twist painting turned facing the corner in my bedroom and I’m not sure why I haven’t thrown it out yet. It pains me to admit but sometimes I was wrong but I tried so hard to do everything right from the bottom of my heart. The South Park shirt that I took one morning from your apartment, it no longer smells like the cologne I gifted to you after being washed too many times. Every so often I’ll pull it from my drawer, a gentle reminder that we had some good moments, that we let our love kindle like incense and let the aroma fill the room, but those good times just could not outweigh the bad.

Six.  
The first time that I admitted that I loved you was after you texted me on a Monday morning that you didn’t think we were meant to be, and I knew that because remember we didn’t have *** enough, we argued too much, but for some reason we both refused to stop wasting matches to relight this love that we knew was going to fan out eventually. Call that insanity or pyromania and **** aren’t Mondays insufferable enough? Haven’t I suffered through enough?
That first time those words escaped my mouth, it was like extinguishing a living room already ravaged by flames and all that you have enough time to grab is the dog and your favorite photo, and I meant it genuinely I loved you for the broken man that you was and for the man you had potential to be but just not for me. It was putting ointment on an obvious gaping wound. It healed nothing, just prolonged the suffering.

Seven.  
Eventually I reached my boiling point, reached the point when I needed to let this dimly lit blaze fizzle out. I know that love isn’t always easy but it didn’t have to be this difficult or unhealthy. Not to exaggerate but I cried for three days straight. I had to mourn you and my fantasies, release your toxins and my own from my body, consume harsh realities and bitter truths, face the ways you triggered me, ask myself the seething question of if I knew I was the bomb, why wasn’t I being treated like it? Why didn’t I subconsciously think that I deserved better than you gave me and what I allowed and accepted? The last time, that lust masquerading as love, I let that wildfire destroy everything in its wake, including me. Even though I was dosed in disappointment and heart ache, I was determined to not let this time be like the past. This body, this heart, and this spirit is not a toxic landfill, or a burial ground, or Ground Zero. I am always a Phoenix rising anew, always the Leo shining, always a firefly. One day I woke up and realized it didn’t hurt as much, my heart still beat and pumped out red and orange currents of ferocious love.

Eight.
My biggest regret was holding on to this for far too long. Letting go took strength that I didn’t know I had, this fiasco taught me so much about myself and about love. I am (too) patient, compassionate, understanding and I am sometimes wrong but I always try to do everything with love. But I am not and will not be anyone’s emotional punching bag just so I can brag that I have a man who buys me gifts or to say that I have a boo for the holidays. Society has conditioned black women to think that we have to suffer in order to be deserving of love, that if you can’t stand the heat then you should stay out of those same kitchens where our black mothers used to drag a chair close to the stove, press that hot comb to our ***** curls, mad that we’re sweating halfway before she’s finished, wincing because she’s burned us but she’ll say that’s just the grease, so yeah maybe us black girls have had our attitudes brewing and been predisposed to the flames but we will not accept your torturing.

Nine.
If you would’ve asked me then what was the color of love, I would’ve said it was you and your cherry water ice colored lips leaving stains on the collars of my shirts that I have yet to wash, it’s us in our Sunday’s best as we went to your church and I prayed with you and for you. It’s the Polo shirt still neatly folded in the brown paper bag hanging on my closet door, I never got the opportunity to give it to you and now I have no idea if I should give it away, return it, or save it for the next man who my heart burns intensely for. It’s that flutter my heart felt once your name came across my screen; the second to last text you sent said that you felt our vibe was off and you have never been more right, I was so over wasting energy trying feed that spark. The last text that you sent you said that you suppose you missed me, and I mean duh of course you would, of course you should. I used to write about my ex a lot, have *** so hot, confuse love with everything it wasn’t, chase men who reminded me of my father until I was scorned and scarred. Now I get to write about you too, and I just needed new material, something to get me charged up, something to get hot ink scalding across the page until I felt the heat on my fingers and the paper disintegrates to ash. But make no mistake, this poem is not all about pain.

Ten.
If you ask me now what is the color of love, I’d say it’s the shine of my peace of mine. It’s the smile I have worn everyday since I actively decided to choose me and my happiness, and not a single tear has fallen over you since, no second guessing, no having my feelings invalidated, no gaslighting, no heat damage pressed on these black curls, I have let them grow out unruly and free, I have never experienced bliss like this after a breakup before. It’s the flash of my mom’s camera as she captures me walking down the aisle during my graduation, I was so proud to be there after several nervous breakdowns and telling myself I was going to quit at least five times. It’s my toes dipped in the warm waters in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, the sun glistening off my smooth chocolate skin that has taken me so many years to be proud to live in, it’s my wounds some old and some new on proud display, learning to leave my Neosporin at home, but I am here and healing and laughing and learning to loving myself better as I haven’t let depression eat alive. If you ask me now what is the color of love, I will tell you that it is me. It has always been me.