To Skate On Sun

Often, I get into these political disputes or debates. This one was significantly interesting for me. Someone posted a FaceBook comment during a brief conversation I was having with another individual. I suggested a book to the person and he got offended and went on “I’m so smart, look what I can say” rant. So this was my response.

“Lol - My eyes have always been open. If you speak to Matt, I’m one of the individuals who always maintain these exact same conversations with him as stimulation. We all know that the public is in need of these kinds of questionings, there isn’t nearly enough.

Now in response to everything you’ve stated above:

If the term terrorism is used as a less pejorative way to identify criminal acts done in response to the effects of different political climates, then it brings me to this…

The Hutu’s and Tutsi’s, regardless, are identified as cultural groups that each performed acts of terrorism on each other. These acts of terrorism, as we began to understand their motives, we later understood these acts as forms of Genocide. But even the term Genocide is controversial because what is Genocide to the American community is less of Genocide and more of critical survival in a less Americanized community.

The American community stepped into this conflict merely because of the super power that we are, and because of the humanitarian powerhouse image that we attempt to uphold within the UN - we had to make sure that civilians and everyone else were safe from the political dispute.

However, the conflict in the middle east directly affects us because of the attacks that we’ve both flipped on each other. Now we have to perform damage control. Now our view, within the eyes of the world is tainted. Now we have to redeem ourselves, or what happens? We owe more money. We lose allies. We lose support. We lose control. This is how we know certain things - simply through inference and common knowledge. We don’t NEED the government to tell us certain things - we know damn well what the overall consensus is and we know what we understand and we KNOW what’s being hidden from us. That’s why we have things like leftism and rightism because there are differences in ideals and opinions and the clash is how we understand our country. It’s a balance.

So the evidence is what we gather - the substantialness of the evidence is what confuses us, but the collective minds of everyone is what helps us makes sense. That’s why rejecting the media and rejecting other writings from other intelligent people who you agree or disagree with is stupid. Because you can’t develop anything without the collective influence of anything else. Your brain can’t conceive everything. Someone has to teach you how to think.”

Someone told me
That this is my night to be redemptive
Like the scream of a thunderstorm in my fists
Is supposed to tell a story
Beyond the ones my lips can convey here.

All I ask
Is for the peace of this page
To speak with me.
An adlib, perhaps
I am fine with being mimicked,
As long as it whispers
The space between the bomb and the cry
Before the story is put on pause.

They tell me that a good woman,
Is re-written into her hair.
That she leaves it nappy,
That she stays still
while a man
Fumbles the quake of his fingers into her scalp.
They tell me,
That he is to search for urchins of soliloquy.
That the way he works his hands out of these coils,
However,
Is how she should measure his persistence.
If it does not hurt,
If there is no sharp
weave of violence singeing at the base of her neck,
then he does not belong in her tendrils.

Contrarily,
He belongs between her legs.

My hair is straight.
It tickles the part of my back,
Where my spine would fold.
Nothing testing or trialing about my scalp,
It does simple things.
It fights with the wind, sometimes.
It’s never really unruly,
I can’t trap any men here;
They follow me at night sometimes.
They ask me about my hair.
Ask me if they can touch it, if they can
Touch me.

I revel in how foolish they are.
I’m not the girl who lets men into herself,
I give myself to the woman
With fingers like birthdays
Who speaks of herself in third person
Because she knows what kind pen
She can un-write herself with.

I never really feel large enough to hug myself.
I’m never small enough to be anyone’s secret.
I am not my aunt’s definition of a good woman;
To her,
I am uppity,
Far too sure of myself.
Too smug to let my hair become the playground
Of a man who will watch all of it fall out
In the swell of childbirth
And old age.

In complete disobedience,
I tuck myself into the pocket of my next girlfriend.
And there may be 12 more of those,
15 of those
If it is my choice, between the now
Or the tomorrow of my womanhood.
And each one will walk away,
With a strand of my loose flailing hair,
Woven into a cuff of their winter sweaters.

I will never worry of being forgotten,
Or preserved.
I will be a memoir of sorts,
The simplicity of me,
Traveling in parts.
These are the parts of me
That don’t mind pausing.

{YES! no more writer’s block}

Your name in my mouth tastes differently now.
Like I can’t speak without spitting.
Like this poem is merely a testament to my shelter.
I’m comfortable in my brown
When it bends for me.

Like dear Love,
(Or ex, by now.)
My breath is built like a sliding sword,
I don’t swallow if it means having to cough myself up,
I’m not heavy
But hardened.
I grip the sun like it lies to everyone else;
I drop emotions like they hate me.
I don’t love often.
I don’t cry often.
I’m great at bullying the mirror 
When its demons tattle to the mist.
I seldom wear red;
Or brown
Or green.
I feel like I don’t fit into my words
When I’m all earth colored like that.

I don’t care much
For people who twinkle themselves into half righteous skipping stones.
Lets get real here:
If I’m fucked up,
Then so are you.
I balance weight on my neck
Like a gravitational shrew of excellence.
I’m don’t excel at this kind of pain;
Never been too great at self portraits.
I’m working here.
I’d appreciate no interruptions;
There’s a sock on the door –
knock when the building
Or breaking
Or blocking is over.
Sometimes it gets nasty this way;
It gets cataclysmic;
It Gets tide pool after a snowstorm.
No worries;
I’ve always been the tidy kind.
I clean up after myself,
I’m lucky enough to know how.

But I digress.
Dear Love
(or ex, by now.)
Right now;
I can’t speak unless I’m spitting
About you.
Can’t spit about you.
Haven’t written anything wholesome,
True enough to spit
For you.
I’m one of those dangerous girls.
Kind of like Plexiglas. 
Or fingerprints.

Sorry if something this tumultuous
Gives you muddy eyes.
If you need your running shoes back,
You can find them at the entrance.
I’m solid [never stagnant] here.

I don’t miss your hands
I don’t miss the way you used to hold me like you know something about my skin
That I don’t.

We were never suitcase lovers.
Never packed up or well folded.
I always honored the flood of you
Loved the way 
your back mapped my sound like I were unraveled vinyl.
Sounded too much like the rip of lover’s lullaby.
I am no one’s baby.

Except for a while,
You held my hand like I was yours.
A deformation of your fallopian tubes.
The indent we make in your bed,
Infantile and childlike.
The way I cup your breasts,
Like my lungs are screaming for something to break me.

You were more than what I asked for. 
A classroom full of stares;
Like they all know that this A plus isn’t for knowing
The difference between Hiroshima
And suicide bombs.
A woman nine years my senior,
This teacher/student cliché taken a little further than
Dusty backdrops in a dark room.

I can’t trust smiles from women like you.
Not when there’s a one way ticket
Stashed in your hair.
A zip-lock of something childhood couldn’t give either of us.
Like Christmas dinners,
And snow days,
And successful weight loss diets.

There’s a whisper in me that knows what it’s like
To rip fingerprints from wrist and bleed 
Like this is my last mourning.
And today I found a picture of you stashed beneath the ricocheting stare
Of a mountain’s back.
Suffocating has never really been my thing
But if it means purging you because I need to
Then here’s the noose
Come drain me.

i remember meeting you
foreign skin and subtle breath 
no breasts 
just yellow chest like you trap the sunlight the way the sky cannot
love you love me not

im sorry that i dont know how to repremand the sin sitting between my thighs 
there is no way to hide us in the night 
look at how bright you are
and how i foolishly tripped you into sunset
God called and asked me for your heart back 
I forgot where I put it

forgive me
for the way i barrier my lips from you
I am simply afraid of being loved all the way through

I remember being the 24th hour
watching you at the peak of midnight 
unsure and willing 
the way you sneak your fingers into pockets of flesh
you dont understand the dangers that lie here
that I am holder broken bullets and tickets to moratoriums
you will find nothing but dead things in the most beautiful of my creases 
I am blood resting on the bottom of a pyramid
impossible and effortless 
you do not need to listen to me breathe another person in my lungs 
there is no space for you here 
in this rusty door hinge i call a heart

for someone who’s so heartbroken 
you would think i could recognize what loves me back
but loves me back means spine
means bending and breaking again
i cant take breaking again
i will break you
thats a promise 

in fact I have before 
and i catch the broken pieces underneath my blood 
when u stare my skin off of my bones
love, 
love me less close the surface of your heart
you need space
I need breathing air
and when I leave
because I will
where will all the sunlight go?

[I can’t express how I feel well, to those of you who want me to talk. So I guess this is what I want to say in a nutshell. I’ll probably hermit for a while.]

Some time ago
A few hours, maybe,
I ripped a Target pillow and my old Barney bear apart.
The insides flew everywhere
And I sat in them.
Just sat there.
Everything white and snowy
Like I screamed some kind of wonderland into appearance.
My mother understood enough to not ask questions,
Understood enough to hide the box cutters,
And the fruit slicers,
And the razors.

The skin of my palms are rough,
From tearing at cotton.
As if this were me, tearing at myself.
Hands
Aren’t meant to break the things that want mending.
Hands
Are only meant to fix the reparable things,
Like a cracked piggy bank,
With elmer’s glue and stickers.

I’m not a cracked piggy bank
I can’t reverse my drama.
Cant reverse the fact that in algebraic terms
I feel less than, never equal to.
A freestyle swim on a treadmill,
Shit like this shouldn’t happen
To people who know where they’re going.

Three 
“sorry, you’re talented but..” letters 
Within three weeks.
Like battle scars aren’t enough to prove that I’m a soldier.
Like sunlight doesn’t bend in windows.
Like stupid sometimes dosen’t teach you enough to want to be smart.
I’ve got a room full of reasons 
Why every single one of these letters is completely rational. 
And I got a chest full of sounds that makes all of it bullshit.
Makes all of this bullshit

Makes me want to start 12 years ago.
Makes me want to tell mommy the first time it happened
Instead of after the 20th time
Before he decided he was done with me, and left.
Makes me want to learn how to be strong for myself
Before I learned how to be strong for everyone else.
I could have saved me first,
Instead of saving all of them.

But when you’re 8,
When you’re scared because mommy’s got a mouth full of opportunity
And you’re scared that a secret
Could fuck it all up for her,
When you don’t wanna see shit go haywire on the outside
Since it’s already Hiroshima bombed on the inside,
It gets hectic.

And then you end up an imploded butterfly 
With the sores that no one wants to touch
Cuz they’re bleeding hurt everywhere.
No one knows how to save you,
So you gotta touch the ground by yourself first
Before your hands can find something solid to push you up with.

I don’t expect a panel of mini-gods,
With a stack of applications to understand
What its like being the kid with nothing left but a flashlight
To touch and feel your way through to the other side.
But you imagine having a kid,
Or being one,
With only two, nearly defective legs to lean on,
And then imagine trying to walk,
Just for someone with better legs than you,
To trip you and dare you to get back up again.
Like you’re not supposed to even think about running.

I’ve been here for so long
With some hope on one arm
And some humility on the other.
I’m not letting go of either.
But I am tired
Of holding on to shit so heavy.