relationships

June 26, 2016

Shallow Breathing

Why do I run?

I feel that I do not deserve you.

Actions, affections, chores,

and probably all our time

contorts itself gruesomely

to fit in to the box that

I have labelled motherhood.

The box burdened

to my mother and

hers before her and all the mothers

that gave rise to me.

And the box seems to get smaller

the more we fight it,

the more guilt we feed it.

 

I was not ready

but then again

when are we ever ready?

Ready to find out that nothing

will ever be the same again.

That it can no longer be about us,

and that now our entire existence

is woven into much more than

we had bargained for on that night

when the rage of carnal desire

silenced every other voice in our minds.

 

and then there you were

with tears in your eyes

and on your cheeks,

and I thought it was a miracle

that your barely formed voice

could make all that noise.

 

Hands shaking,

mind buzzing,

heart pounding

because his little nose

and his toes and fingers

and the thought of his little

heart beating

makes you wonder if you’ve

actually been alive up until

this point.

 

Now, 2 months before you turn 4,

I realize that I was never

running from you.

I was running, I’ve been running

from myself and all the things

that I’ve choked to sleep in my mind

and in my soul so that I can cope.

My new definition of the word cope:

chocolate without cocoa,

the sea without salt,

air without oxygen,

life without living.

 

You and I

will never embody

the ideals of the perfect

mother-son relationship.

Not because we can never be perfect

but because these ideals,

formed and perpetuated by society

(which includes you and I),

are a gross violation of all

that is natural and beautiful

between mother and child.

 

I am mother and you are child.

I do not use your or my because

our existences can not be

woven into each other.

 

*”It is my first time being a mother.

It is your first time being a child”

and finally I understand that

we can just be.

 

*A quote from my aunt Clare Parsons

This is the second poem I wrote about my fears and facing them.

 

 

June 17, 2016

African Lips

His lips, big African lips

like his mother carried

water on her head and his father

father wore animal skin.

Like when he was in

his  mothers womb, those lips

gave rise to the rest of him.

His lips are, simultaneously,

all the tears of June 16

and  all the euphoria of April 26.

You see, he thinks I don’t know

but oh I know how much he

hides behind those lips,

behind his gated teeth

that cage his tongue

and I know he wont like

me saying these things

but I have to

because I want him to know

that I know what he

thinks I don’t know because

somehow in my fixer mind

this means I love him,

because for the first time

I don’t want to fix someone.

I just want to lay on his chest

as it hungrily consumes his

heart beat, leaving crumbs of him

all the way to my soul that stores

him in glass and titanium so he’ll

never leave.

In that moment I am reminded

that I am the one who needs

fixing. But also that no matter

how many times my jagged edges

draw blood,

he will always have enough left over

to rap for me,

to help me put on my shoes,

to get mad at me for falling asleep,

to wipe my tears away.

 

His lips, big African lips

that reverberate with the

beat of a thousand drums

and the silence of a

thousand thousand tree’s.

His lip, dipped in the red river

of the struggles of being black,

his lips pour out the struggle of

being human.

I think pour is the wrong word:

his lips tornado out the struggle

of being human.

And in a gust of lyrical genius

he unknowingly, intricately

reveals to me the struggle of being

a black man, loving a fair skinned

woman.

And in a gust of lyrical genius

he gently, lovingly peels back

the layers of me only

stopping so we can breathe,

so he can remind me why he

loves each divergently.

 

His lips, big African lips

are the perfect contrast

between naive hope and

cynical pessimism.

He thinks I don’t

see the light dancing in his iris’s

which is weird for me:

its the only thing

keeping me from complete darkness.

He thinks I don’t see the

labyrinth of darkness

woven delicately into his pupils

which is weird for me:

every single cell in my body

understands the dark.

This is not to say that

I understand his darkness,

only that I appreciate its

ironic incandescence.

I can lead us both through

the darkness, with the light

from his eyes.

 

His lips, big African lips

inhale, exhale

regale the tale of a

child, never held, but always loved.

Of a mother strong but rigid.

Of sisters always loving, never loved.

Of an angry black man with

dreams that society refuses to

make room for or understand.

Of a black man who can do anything

but wants to do the one thing he’s

told he can’t do.

Of a black man in the struggle

of consciousness.

 

His lips, big African lips

that blow metaphorical kisses

at thick women,

that plant literal kisses

on my inner thigh

and I have to sigh:

among all the toxicity

in the lungs of society

he is the perfect dose

of oxygen.

 

 

 

January 17, 2016

You May be a Kalopsia

I want to find my way back to you.
The you you were when
We were at the park
And your head was in my lap
And we were speaking about poetry
And music and life and all the things
We hoped we would be
And all the things we hoped
We would change.

I want to find my way back to you.
The you you were when
You held my hand
And walked proudly with me
In the mall to help me buy groceries.
When you pushed the trolley
And I pretended I was concentrating
On the difference in the prices of coffee
When I knew damn well that all I could think was:
“He is here with me”.

I want to find my way back to you.
The you you were
When we spoke about my writing
The you that made me feel like
The conciousness of the whole
World was at the tip on my tongue.
The you who made me want to write
And made me believe I could write.

I want to find my way back to you.
The you you were
After our bodies were exhausted
By the explosions that had consumed
Us. And we were candid and open and brutally
Honest about things we lied to ourselves
About everyday. The you that opened my mind
To things my heart had hidden away.
The you that was my sweet escape
The you that I wanted to be my forever
The you that felt like home.

How do I get back to that you?
When you are so many different things?
When you break me, where you know I have been broken before?
When you lie?
When you make me cry? All the tears.
When you make me second guess everything
That I though was true because
How the fuck could I have been
So incredibly wrong about you.

Can you get back to something
You aren’t sure was ever really there?

October 22, 2015

Indulgence

Love

all that is

broken.

A certain unexplainable

essence posses the underdog.

I can fix you

so I can fill my blank

spaces with

the time it takes

to put all your pieces

back together.

Devotion of every waking

and even every sleeping

moment

to creating a mosaic

from all your shattered

stained glass pieces.

See I can’t do things

Half-hearted.

It’s all or its

Nothing.

Problem?

I leave them with all

and I end with

February 11, 2015

Relationships

When I don’t have shoes on

The hearts in my feet

Long to feel the comforting embrace

Of a pump

They look at other feet with shoes on

And they weep inside

Wondering when their turn will come

They feel bare and exposed

Lonely

Alone

And they want shoes

To hold them tight,

To hold their pretty pink nails

And their hard heels.

When my feet have shoes on

They, at first, enjoy the companionship

But then they start to feel uncomfortable

And the shoes are too pink, too bright,  too dull, too long, too short, too high, too low, too dressy, too casual. They are just too much!

They can’t breath and the seams seem to get tighter and tighter

And tighter and suddenly they can’t tell themselves from the shoes any more and they feel like they are losing their identity

Like they can’t be the same with shoes on and they want them off

NOW.

And then they question what exactly

They were longing for.