To Skate On Sun

Listen:

We both learned to hustle the bullet

early.

You let me hedge your empire ,

You say ‘hold this’ and my

pockets are caving but I ride

with it

early.

Childhood will never indicate

that the man who loves

you out of such bustling

wallpaper will be the one

to cripple your bridge but

god,

Jimmy,

I would crumble for you.

I coughed to hear my chest rattle.

This old beating

must’ve taken to stale the

moment I gave it away.

But here I am now,

stupid with mastering

my own opera —

grieving for the haughty

chimney I willed my body

to be —

so easily dismayed in

wake of the shiny

things.

I let you steal

into me;

know that I am dishonest.

Know that your 

desire to still me

was a toast made

to the minced

hearts that found

the tail ends of songs

and 

swallowed them 

anyway.

with spacey silence and a retired

foreman’s hands.

I promised the wrong

floorplan to the wrong

person. I’ve only a tea candle

and a prayer, now. 

a child, my mother traveled

so often. I memorized

the trail of frankincense from

my room to the door. I knew,

when the air creased behind her,

that I’d no right to cry. I could

not be arrogant enough to 

request placidness from a

woman who’d named me

after a sound.

I am a hungry exhibitionist,

with a pellet of dough

and a Sankofa reference

waiting for me to move

along. The shadows

are not where anyone should

leave love,

But mine is enough of a corner.

And so, I feel no guilt.

of a prophet. I half expect

Malcolm to come for me

with the bullets in

his palms

his fingers

dressed in his own blood

from where he’d wedged 

them out, like splinters.

I expect him to say

“Babu, you are a child of

all feathers.”

But my mother named 

me after a sound;

I am loud and trembling

and not weightless enough

to be left behind.

God traveled here.

Sat in all the middle of me.

I kept thinking of running

away with it’s map. “See? Look

at what I’ve got; the mouth

of a wanderer.”

~

I looked in the face

of a new book

and read everything

incorrectly, upside down.

The problem with a seer is

the promise of sight;

I see everything that will

ruin me before

it sees itself. I carry its 

secret with exalt and 

sand. When it speaks

of restraint, of prudence,

I hear

“wait”.

I hear “come softly.”

~

If I told you that

I was a caged

risk,

would you come

to take me?

Answer honestly.

Do not worry that I 

am expecting it of you.

I only expect things

from the God that has gone.

But you are the one

who will pull the horizon

from me, in an orange

of patience. You are the

bridge. The creek.

The chance to fall in.

When my heart was most feeble,

it still thought that it could walk with dinosaurs.

At any given moment,

it was a purpling prophet with its mouth

stored in a closet.

In the quake of patient opportunity

I was in fear of it most, of its

noble anger,

of the way it is always most loyal to me.

Now, I burn a new candle

for all the deflation.

Every broken heart gives

up when you tell it to find its own

way home.

Sometimes, though

I think I make up reasons

to find all of it beautiful,

a sprouted garden on an unsuspecting Monday.

Imagine holding

earth for the first time

and not knowing that you

are obligated to let it go…

Everything is heavy.
The night has become a water buffalo.
This morning, the sidewalks
coughed in blonde silence.
No one spoke.
The children carried limp
rambunctiousness and
questioned idly like trailer homes,
and the mothers just walked.
They urge, “quickly”.

Here, I lift my hands against
the sky and compare sizes.
My mother and the other mothers of our
block giggle, their voices like falling rice.
They twirl in honest spirals about
how amazing it will be;
to see how the earth punishes itself.

We drill emergency evacuation plans
through a round of monopoly, and mock
our own inherent discomfort with
shy interruptions of “What if the window,
or wall -
what if we break?”

We leave our living room open
until the last bit
of sureness has left the room.
Then we’ll bustle to close it.
Until then, we take note of how
often we smell the ocean.

wwwevol:

O, Heaven, you starstruck junkyard,

bright blue Goliath,

you flock of inadequate gods,

I stand before you mad,

unforgiving & unbaptized.

I have let go of my father,

I have covered him in teeth.  

I have punished my mother

with an anvil of shit. 

I am a vengeful child. 

An awful dog—

I bite and I bite. 

O, Heaven, I know not 

where I belong,

so I choose to stay here, 

within my own blazing heart,

where the wild soul hibernates,

where I hold lost friends

in a deep red sleep.Tonight 

I have renamed my blood. 

I have opened its every door.

Tonight I spill with ghosts,

(child of a tarnished sermon)

tonight I am the soil

bringing them back to flesh. 

I resurrect, O, Heaven, I resurrect.

Here the tongue presses 

against the space

of the missing tooth and sings.

Here the drowned lift from the water,

blood swimming through them

quick as fish. Here The Gone come back,

they come back and O, Heaven, 

they do not remember leaving.

Here a man rocks his lover to sleep, still.

Here, grief scatters as light 

bursts from a writer’s hand.

Here the children outrun the wolves,

and our bodies thrill with 

amnesia; they have forgotten

their own betrayals, they know

not how to accept a bullet,

know not how to feed a tumor

or become the hammer. 

Here we haunt each other, sweetly,

gather memories in the rooms of ourselves,

until we have learned each other 

so well, we cannot die.  You cannot die.

I cannot die. 

We carry and carry on

until we are heavy with joy. 

Until our hearts keep time long

after they have stopped.

O, Heaven, can you hear it? 

The ticking pulses

in our throats? Can 

you hear the ash and soil

rising up to bring us home?

(Source: facebook.com, via thekingofallwildthings)

You were the loudest man I had ever met;
A
crowded room,
a command,
a call for reception.

I watched you,
and nothing else
could have a language -
it was yours,
you were its proposal.

When watching a deaf
man learn to love a privilege
he cannot benefit from,
tell him he is the driver.
Tell him love is a taxi.
When it dies in his mouth,
he’ll never know.

Before we taught our first
born to sign,
we taught her to
walk on her hands.
A calloused palm
is a hand bankrupted into
survival. You wanted to know
that she could barrel through
anything too silent.

Our baby’s first word
was “winter”.
In a span of an hour,
she slung it at
every wall
like her own song,
and you kept missing it.
What vehicle is
discourse if it faints before
its own obstruction?

When you left,
I taught her to sign
“Overwhelmed”,
so that if you ever
came back,
I could say “See? We finally learned.”

is a silly decision

I made.

A big one.

It falls into novelty

like a new eye,

It doesn’t wait for me. Or anyone.

It thinks monogamy is dusk’s

ferry ride.

It smiles back,

it hampers,

it finds a bridge and trips off of it.

You are the Golden Gate.

Find an unsuspecting boy - give him a room full of balloons. Pop them all. Tell him “this Is the sound my heart makes”. Run away.

I think its broken.

My pillow won’t flip cold anymore.

I think there are some arms out there,

just missing me.

It’s a train car kind of night.

I reach out

into all that air -

I pull back nothing.

This morning I took a bath under an open roof. Check it: me, dressed in an immature pond, looking up at the earth - but school taught me to look down on it, so now I know to ask permission. Earth? Sky? Why you be so glass hungry? Why you be so ready to big up everything? Some things don’t deserve cultivation – lets keep our garden private, just you and me. I live next to a safe-house for the deaf. Last night the thunder came without the big light, I was scared for them – how they know when the rain is coming? I know. I always know. My body holds ninety-two percent of its own water. I stand in the middle of the street – I buoy. I make my mouth a trademark, I lighthouse, I scream “land”, I know bones all vibrate with me. You? You elite. You make me jealous. You aiight. I don’t get jealous. I wear all the nice things and hide.

I don’t think we’re brave enough

to be who we’d want to love.

Its like holding the sun in your mouth

without calling it morning.

Strange sentiment, I know,

but I think being with you is

a fistful of diamond dust in an hour glass.

All these stark introductions, with the

exit wounds hemmed.

Reminds me that this is what

the mystical wait for -

a reason to compare this incessant

thumping to something designed

by the shaking of everything else.