The mailman does not bring me what I want, but it’s not his fault. His job is being on the streets. There are folks who want someone else to be stronger because they have jobs. So they go to the cafes & wait, read books about racial inequality & imagine participation.

I will open the door to these cafes and maybe a bell will tinkle. I do love dreamers. But I sit in the corner of the streets, reading the same books because I am waiting for someone. It’s not my fault, say the dreamers. They will look at me nervously if my face is not carved.

The books do not bring me what I want & it’s not in the café’s imagination. The mailman has a job to lose, the folks who write the faults about participation. Bring them to me so I can sit in the corner and you can walk by dreaming about twinkling hells, if my waiting is stronger

Than your dream of inequality I will imagine my participation in all the books of the streets when folks are not strong & only read books about doors. I do hate dreamers. And carved bells. The mailman’s streets bring me what I do not want & this door of the café seems stronger when I walk to the corner They do not look nervous if my face is not tinkling but folks still waitin to read the same books

I wore so much makeup and kept my hair too bright.
I questioned everything you said and made your soft spot my bullseye.
You see,
I wanted to be like Layla.
She was so easily loved.
Her meat was tough,
so loving her was at times a matter of luck,
but when earned, she would keep you full for months.
I am chewy
and I would turn the stove on high to make the both of us squirm.
We were in love under the terms of change
and you never stepped on my skirt to make me stay.
You saw me like my skin was made of lace,
you held me careful and talked to me like I would easily break.
Then with no foot on my leaving,
I crashed beneath my neurotics.
I never said goodbye.
I hung myself, thinking that I would become a butterfly.
I wanted you to catch to me,
but now all of the pain is mine.
because we don’t even speak
and I still can’t fly.

a white man cannot have rage
& little boys need to act their age
meanwhile i’m about to steal another page
from another book i couldn’t afford off minimum wage

i could spend two hundred years walkin’ across this whole land
& there’s still some things i would never understand
like how can two men, one black & one white
be treated so differently, day & night
we got one scrubbing floors or else behind bars
& the other one we put inside luxury cars
take a guess which is which, who you thought was who?
next question: what are we as a people gon’ do
cause i’ve seen pictures of the black man hanging in the wind swaying
beside a little white girl dressed in her sunday best, playing
& when on that i think
inside i shrink
like a penis in cold water
that coulda been my father that committed that slaughter
i can’t fathom what would make them gather to lynch
i wanna stand against that like atticus finch
cause even tho i was born with white skin
i’ve always felt like an outsider, lookin’ in
through a peephole
like where’s my people?
i don’t resemble that
i can’t relate
to these motherfuckers filled with so much hate
& that’s a legacy that i refuse to inherit
if there’s a burden i’ll share it
help to carry it but i will not just grin & bury it
i can accept some losses
but i do not accept the white sheets & burning crosses
i do not accept the orders from the bosses
the good ol’ boys club sittin’ high on their horses
despite all forces, make my own choices
& i’mma always do my best to be open to all voices
& it might not always be possible
but i’mma have more patience than a third world hospital
& maybe in that way i’mma grow to be
the person that i most wanna be
& eventually see the change that i most wanna see

You stand in the kitchen, bare,
your body turned away, your hands busy,
maybe cutting cabbage, a pear.

I can see your legs, the space between–
but the whole of you is here.

I am alone on most nights, and so are you.
On some nights, I touch myself.
On these nights your body, too, opens.

To understand you would be one thing,
to stand next to you would be another.
I am a lonely woman who longs for woman

and so are you, and the way you stand near the counter
brings me peace. The world has ended.
This is the aftermath–your bare body,
my longing to touch.

You hold my hand, walk me out of where I am,
and then I am far from you again, but you still hold and hold.

My mouth is a wish
and the space between your legs is a folded ocean,
a book loosely opened.

Our arms are miles, stretched.

When I eat from my garden
you slice the harvest,
close your eyes, dream.

Toss a stone into the siphon
and feed the growth
and lay in the muck.
Spread out with hands      and heels.
Focus,
on the mouths,
unintended.
Lying, wondering
how it will be      post-mortem.
Hands locked in      the cut of your chest
or separate;
like a textbook diagram.
A heap somewhere.
Idle.
A man;
gripped in a glass jaw.
Pissing and shoving.
“Sign language”
in the gripping silence.

I thought I was a teenaged Fancy Boy wearing duke’s clothing
But I’m just a junk stash from Texa$ Wearing a ten-cent suit
Smoking out of that trash can love
We’re command center titans
Goddamnit
I don’t have time
For this
For waiting in line
Be comfortable
Make me poetry out of those ol’ marionettes
I got you last June
Let’s kill the President
It’ll be sexy

The unforgivingness tied to your swimming beauty
spewed through the fabric of my Life.
My shaking hands grasped with a slippery clutch
filled with some kind of love that left your hips.

I toiled and writhed unbecoming, a wet movement
when you buried me in your ocean roar,
a bare back tide of overflowingness too large
for me to swallow (from sea to shining sea!)

Crash after crash, kiss after kiss,
each unmistakable passing of flood
brought dripping feet into depths of drumming oceans so blue
my heart stopped pumping to match colors but
continued to drown ‘til drought which never came.

When you die, waterflowers will spill out of your mouth
a blossoming bouquet of breaths and sighs.

As I stood there in the kitchen
        holding my favorite slicing knife
in my right hand she asked me,
        “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m showing you what a metaphor looks like.”
        I replied.
I pressed my left arm down
        against the cutting board
                with my palm up
as I raised the knife high in the air.
        “This is honesty.” I told her,
                before bringing the knife down
     and rushing the blade through my flesh,
between the bones,
     and down into the bit of wood beneath it.

They don’t use cars much here in Venice
Unreal traffic and the people change slowly
Now and then I go veering
Brains abluster from the pastry décor
(That’s what my situationist neighbor calls it)
Which has begun to look familiar
Postmodern or postmortem?
I’ll never get over the alps
Sure I’m pissed
But I’m no morose type
Hopping from planet to planet
Bringing joy whenever I go
Inverses appeal to me
The tenor steps aside for the flautist

Virginia O’Brien’s deadpan lullaby kills me every time
If I had blood I’d be blushing
Lately I’m all electric brain
(That’s what my landlady says)
I try to find time not gravely for others
Reading under an elm at the cemetery
She said she’d like more sincere friends
That made me laugh which pissed her off

When the connection got fuzzy I didn’t speak up
I simply cut the line
I’m still in the book
Much later night fell kerplunk on the guggenheim grotto
And there was music without wrinkles

Venetian water tastes pissy
For comic effect
I feel funny
But nobody’s laughing at this jubilee
Rose eats a nectarine in the sun
With bubbles in her hair
She’s getting loose with a jerk
Wearing pince nez and fake hair
He takes a pebble out of her slipper
And swallows it
She’s afloat
Everything not feathers is a goner
Which makes me feel funnier
Human cannonball or comet scene
Isn’t laughter the proper response?
Well I’m not going to apologize
My heart is doing a bolero

he told her he’d be right back.
he didn’t grab a coat.
he walked on the sidewalk.
he saw an ant.
he pointed down at the ant, and said, ‘don’t piss me off.’
he walked into a hospital.
he stood in front of an elevator.
he climbed three flights of stairs.
he began to crawl.
he crawled up into a hallway on the seventh floor.
he climbed into the bed of a terminally ill patient.
he thought it would be nice if his name was john.
he held ‘john’ tight.
he told ‘john’ he felt beautiful.
he told ‘john’ that he was beautiful.
he pulled the sheets over his head and hid from ‘john’.
he walked to the window and threw himself out of it.
he felt like an elevator.
he walked by a store and stopped in front of the dark store display.
he stared at a mannequin.
he touched the pane of glass that separated them.
‘we are alone.’
he didn’t make eye contact with the mannequin, as his greasy hand slid down the glass.
‘we are alone.’
he smudged the glass with a trail of intimacy..
he was face down in front of the mannequin.
‘I am alone.’
he looked for the ocean.
he couldn’t find it.
as he stood up, he reached out to the night.
he touched the dark.
he wanted to be close to the nothing.
he asked the nothing what it’s problem was.
‘just deal with it.’
he walked up to his front door.
he looked at a pile of dead leaves under a tree in his yard, and asked, ‘are you
happy now?’
he opened the door.
he didn’t have to take his coat off.
he climbed back into bed.
she said, ‘I love you.’
he said, ‘yea.’