Happy New Year!
My blessings exceeded my misfortunes this past year and I hope this coming year will be the same for me and for you. Learn to love, to forgive yourself and you just might be on your way to do the same around you. You already know that change starts with the man in the mirror.
I had to wake up. I had to leave Over There so I can be Here. Back here, with my head buzzing with voices and people from Over There. I sit for a moment, dizzy with what had just happened. Searching, feeling for, in this cold and lighted world, for my North Star and the little confidence left to guide me home.
I was back where I started: I had to build piece by piece my staircase up to God. I had stopped asking for help from right and left because people kept stealing my tools and I didn’t know who it was because they all smiled at me with their milky white smile and their wine red tongue.
I happen to hang out with those who hate me because their honesty is quick to kill that little vermin of laziness that’s rampant up and down under my skin.They put a cord around my neck and they gently pull until all my 250 lbs (246 lbs on a good day) is supported by my toes and once I’m there, they give me back my tools and ask me to finish what I started, but to hurry up because that oxygen wasn’t going to last forever. The worst part of it all is that I was losing my sight now that everything was on the line.
But then again, you see, my life and the life of mine has always been on the line, funny thing is we have never realized how short that line was.
I finally was going to meet God and put on a face on that name. All I had to do is wait a little while. Wait for the oxygen to run out, for my fear to gas away and my soul to sing its way out. And to think angels and demons envy us for having bodies. But they decided to let me down just when I started to make out His features.
So I am back to where I started: Building a staircase to go meet God. one piece at a time.
We are the dusk women
golden bronze skin sweating
between the stars and daybreak
and when day breaks
we still have moonlight strangled in our tresses
the stars from last night dancing on our cheeks
this night
we’ll keep the babies in the corner
and sing them to sleep with songs…
tragic, fierce and beautiful, I love it.
I like how you mispronounce words sometimes, how you fumble and stammer and stutter looking for the right ones to say and the right ways to say them. I appreciate that you find language challenging, because it is, because everything manmade is challenging. Including man, including you.
When you sleep on your side, I like to map the constellations between your beauty marks freckles pimples, the minuscule mountains that sprinkle your back. I like the tufts of hair you forgot to shave and the way you smell when you haven’t showered in a while; I like the sleep left in your eyes.
I like the way your skin dies in the middle of the night, how you die from embarrassment the next morning; how you writhe in the snake casing you’ve left behind. I like that you think pillow snowflakes carry more weight than pillow talk; that you think my opinion of you is so fickle that it could change overnight. (It’s not.)
I enjoy seeing you insecure, vulnerable. I like to watch red steam light up your cheeks, a spreading mist of shame when you think you’ve done something unacceptable like missing a step on the stairs or not having the perfect answer to something I’ve said. It’s like you honestly don’t know how wonderful you are, it’s like you have no idea.
The burns, the scars, the black and blues on your face body heart, I want to know their stories. I want to know what hurt you, who hurt you, how bad the damage is. I like your hard, ugly toenails and the layer of fat that lines your belly, the soft parts you try to hide. It’s okay to be soft, sometimes.
I appreciate your ability to get inappropriately angry as much as I appreciate your willingness to apologize afterward. I like how your passion manifests unpredictably and uncontrollably, how your feelings cannot be caged or concealed, how you’re incapable of apathy.
I like how you can’t dance, how you have pedestrian taste in music, how the worst song on every album is your favorite. I like how enthusiastic you are when you hear it, it’s like you don’t know how terrible it is, it’s like maybe how you’re able to love someone like me. (Perhaps that’s your biggest flaw, perhaps that’s the one I love most.)
Your flaws single you out, set you apart, make you different from the rest, and thank god. I don’t just
put up withsettle foraccept your blemishes, I like them. I like them because they make you human, and humans are easier to love than photographs and illusions and ideals; humans fit more easily between arms and between legs; humans are welcome to their imperfections because if there’s one thing humans can do perfectly, it’s love. Humans can love, they can do it flawlessly.
Hunger
It rocks you at night
right and left while sleep slips under you
to never come back.
Hunger
you try to drown it in water
it resurfaces moments later, the shadow of a smile on its face
hunger
it plays mind tricks on you
it creates before you a table filled with delicacies
that are too sweet and too mouth watering to be named
but your stomach trumpets its approval
while you smack your lips together with expectation
Hunger
It slips its lengthy tongue inside you
and sucks out all the niceness out of you
leaving you: Armed and Dangerous
Hunger
It kills slowly and without mercy
it has devoured the weak and the strong
it has eaten up the old and the young
but drives you mad when it can’t kill you
hunger
it wakes you up at night
when you were lying in your bed pretending to sleep
trying to hold in your cupped hands your little self
trying to hold to the little part of you that’s still there and kicking
refusing to let go
refusing to let you go
keeping your heart beating even when your mind has died
but dreams and visions still pass through your eyes
reminding you that tis shall pass too
that when all is said and done
you will walk out here
whatever is left of you will walk out here and tell the tale of
hunger.
Note from the author: Hunger is not black, pot bellied, snot nosed and arms raised toward white, benevolent hands. Hunger is not on TV. Hunger knows no color, no creed, no religion, no class. It changes names, becomes bulimia for the rich, but hunger never goes away. You have to meet your hunger and hold it captive. It just might save you.
The Weeknd & Michael Jackson – Dirty Diana (JAYBeatz Mashup)
can’t compare the two so might as well just enjoy the music
L’art est un mensonge qui nous fait comprendre la vérité, du moins la vérité qu’il nous est donné de pouvoir comprendre.
Pablo Picasso, 1923.
Tom Waits, “Please Call Me Baby”, The Heart of Saturday Night (via raclures)
well but you need to put some distance between you and them otherwise they will keep dragging you to their level…
Just woke up with a poem in my head, and too many ideas in my head. I hate/ love when my body can just decide after 3 hrs of sleep that it has had enough and that I should get up and do stuff.
Oh well, time for some writing and reading…
Baby Jesus is the only God/Man baby born with an organ donor lifetime membership attached to Him,
The black markets don’t want Him because He tagged Himself : FREE
So every Sunday, Christians have God on the menu,
Why don’t you come over?
Clutch Magazine: “Celebrating the Black Beauty on White Women” (via thespunkywallflower
) n
nuff said
