II. What if I told you, I’ve never seen soil like your soul before,
perfect for growing.
What if I told you,
Your heart was so pure it doesn’t beat;
it blooms.
I think there’s spring inside you.
But I vowed no more muses, no more dragon headed rose bushes
With beautiful faces and thorn fangs.
No more writing wishes
And farewell kisses urgent 
as words in boldface.
But in less than a stanza,
You wooed me into the room, like the first cries of a lone violinist
In an empty auditorium.
Plucking imperfections.
Saying if life is a tune
Then I just want to play it better.
How on God’s green earth am I back here, in the same field
With garden tools and orchid bruise still fresh
But your fruit is still fresher.
Believing in resurrection- that life rises from dirt.
Despite all the hurt,
I still know harvest when I see it.

III. I used to be a statue, transfixed stone
Staring at the pretty boy with snakes in his hair.
Come winter, when my skin turns to marble
You can still see his fingerprints there-
fissures and cracks
His handiwork.
But like I said before…
You garden you.
Tender farmer, unharden.
This pile of bricks. You are building me into butterfly hive.
Honey shrine. Stomach can’t sit still and stew no more.
Gotta break free.
Belly got wings. The heights are in my bowels.
Feeding me a smattering of stars.
Every constellation, I mean conversation with you
is like the dropping of bread crumbs-
The littlest bit draws the whole heaven.
So don’t be an angel quoting scripture one minute
And the next be a vulture talking with your mouth full.
Don’t follow me like a guardian and then follow me like a scavenger
I’ve been a skeleton before.
Please don’t scare me.
Be a laughing field of jasmine, opening my night.
Be gentle, be light, be feather, and float.
Can’t fly.
Only fall.
All I got is lungs
with air in them.
Don’t rob me
yet.

ink clots my pen full of _____

as I paint abortions.

You.

Me.

Forever.

Once.

Laying down with night,
my side has been a salted field.
No warmth of struggling spring felt inside my flesh.
I wailed at stones and knew my body
as a ghost knows its graveyard
crowded with longing.

And there amongst the ribs
bent to shepherd’s rods, He planted
a horde of romance roses.
Candles of red perfume.
He spread a feast on my bed
and honeyed my sorrow.

If I loved Him at all,
I would become like the stalks of wheat
braided by His drafts.
Like an obsessing cymbal
whose echoes cannot forget His name.
My devotion ripples and waves.
I wait to become clear.

Who am I that He loves me?
Should a seamstress protect a stain?
Tell the Lord, I no longer hide in shadows
for fear He would overwhelm me.
Fall upon my face.
So I may worship
with evergreen faith
the noon of Your beauty.

once. (1) Shake. (2) Serve… for old time’s sake.

It’s a piece of junk.

I fell in Lolita with the first two,
They were so ungroomed and took to the nakedness of wisdom as easily as expected.
I told them nothing. I gave them suck. They liked the lie of silence.
The latter I adored with all my dwindling optimism.
It loved the secret of my ankles and for that I told it:
“I know I can narrow my gaze, growl my desire, lick my fangs like any trained predator,
But when you hold me I want you to feel innocent, my blood.”
That was as close as I could come to “I pray to God I don’t turn you.”
But I did and when it died
It pumped its final breath out of an opium pipe.
I mixed it with magnesia and to old age be true
I have lived a hundred lifetimes in those last words.

The river of analyses, I’ve played in. Pon de river. Pon de bank.
My head beat like laundry against the rocks and I thought
Of ironing boards and getting everything straight
But I fell inside the wrinkle of another dream’s forehead.
In the trench war – memory versus records- I met Athena
And I’m telling you she couldn’t weave hair (or victories) worth a damn.
She was no virgin, she slept with my rage and I swore not to tell my religion.

When crossing my fingers
I am fickle as a mojito with a twist,
And in the peaceful decadency of Old MacDonald’s rolling pasture
Surrounded by lilac blooms, fastidious bumble bees
And the dainty cough of summer
We lived for the damnation of doing so.

Here’s to choice!
Here’s to the bacchantes!
To the laugh!
To what’s all the rage in the black-eyed skull of night!
To the corpse, she river-dances!
And life’s yawning zipper!

Knee surgery – woman. Aged

happiness

blind, blind, blind.

The night fought the moon with a night stick
in the dark
One night, two moons ago.

Two moons ago, one night
the moon fought the dark.
It was a pale moon.
The moon looked like a moon
full of rocks.
The moon loved the night
It threw itself at the night.
The moon got its rocks off.

The moon hated the night.
Threw rocks at the night.
It was a Palestinian Moon.
A big pale Palestinian moon.
The night was not.
The night was black.
The night was a nigger.
A nigger named Night.
A muslim named Moon.

So basically there were two men in the night
under the moon fighting love…

But men love fighting, so were they really men?
Fine.
Two women in the night
Under the moon fighting love.
Women love to fight.
Especially over lovers
Especially about love.
Two women in the night under the moon fighting about love.

It was a love tap
It was a love punch.
It was a punch, love.
Run in the morning.
No, I stick to the Night.
It was a love slap.
His hand felt like a night stick.
He hits what he loves.
So long as he doesn’t leave what he loves.
Men don’t love love.
Men fight things they don’t love.

So it was two men in the night fighting love
And men love a good fight
and never leave a good fight.
Two women hating the fight.
But loving the men.
And women never leave a good man.
So there was hate and love one night under the moon
Two moons ago.

Separating sea and segregation is a thin
diet of road
where during the day I guarantee
each house sits
bloated, white wedding dress.
Longed after but not
touched the houses
crystallize.
And the afternoon, inside an iron
maiden, sobs its age.

Time changes sex.
And when night
is at its most masculine,
stroking its mountain beard
full of star lice,
the antebellum guards stand
watch, platoons of porches
stifling laugh lines
in their floor boards.

For you, love and slavery are the same beautiful.
Only a virgin’s imagination has dreamt the sordid adulteries
spreading hand to mouth
in the spaces
between a light switch.

[What an Old Southern trick! Secrets sausaged between who we are
and what we’ve done.
Secrets only
the help can whisper ]

In my cab, a man with powdered sugar English
shows me the southern hospitality only middle easterners know.
He hears in my voice a twinge of distain for the Anglicized
name he slave-labors in. Mansur,
I too know the sound of
distance. He sees draped
around my neck
the rags of my best friend
and Home [previously unwelcome] bullies its way through his throat traffic.

“You speak Arabic?”

“You are my family.”

I think Home few times in life.
But to call today familiar
would be too white of a lie.
It is mine.
Down to the hopeless toes, five peninsulas praying to God-rock.
It is mine.
Every confederate-refugee-thick-tongued-lowland-skin-covered inch of it.
It is mine the way
baby teeth were

mine… an interesting word for possession.
They mined the banks of the river
all the way to the Big House
looking for their bones.
A fortune
promised in the break.

…Swamp seek
Knee deep
Air boat
Lynch rope…

And somewhere
nearly far
enough away
people are spoons, salvaging the nothingness
and serving it over rice.
Everyone is a hunger
pain’s earthquake further from whole
closer to gaps with
another beginning to stomach ache.
Another land before time
that could have been mine and was almost
theirs
but today is standing in its aftershock
philosophizing over rubble.

One Home
3 generations still digging underneath it.
Betting everything on the dog fight between poverty and pride.
I overheard them
talking triggers and Patois
in kitchens, stranding
history
on the gutter islands of our palettes.
Je ne sais pas le mot pour la mienne.
Is it a presidential palace
dipping against
the skyline, looking nothing like a tango?
Mish arfa al kalima lii baytii, lii 3latii.
Is it the skinny neck of a desert, guillotined between
some people and no place?
Is it swamps and Spanish moss with Corinthian capitals whispering about wealth?
Is it strip malls so suburban it’s sickening?
I’ve walked in rooms black women were raped in.
Then went shopping.
I don’t know the word for home.
Is it anything
close to bastard?