My Bounty

Who gave you rights to my body? Or rights to my time and labor?

Have you supplied me with shelter enough to grant you unpreferred access to my bounty?

Am I a servant to you? Or mere property?

The food of this body offers no sustenance when taken by demand,

This hot dish feeds only when offered with a happy heart

Take and eat and soon your muscles and your skin fall from your bones

For they never receive abundant nourishment or love’s sweetness

To the New Year (Chinese or other)

Forget the entitlement you had to my hand

Last year’s promises have all been dismissed

The Fact

It was the broken car, smashed against the light post

And the dark green jacket half pulled through the window

And the dimness of the winter day, causing all to list into unrealness

And seeing myself outside myself, like some minor character in a black and white movie

That caused my introspection

And the detached acceptance of the fact, that I will never love him

Safe and Connected

Seems you can turn off or tune out

I’m begging for you to want to know me

And you appear distracted or uninterested in my complexity

I’ve taken a lover, once or twice, who can match or best me in intensity

But then balance tips to drama and harmony disappears

So with you I tone it down, but it feels like stopping up a gushing well

I just long for you to look into my eyes and search for my soul – beyond personality -

Then wrap me in your arms and say, I understand

That’s how I feel safe

Reckoning

Sweet though you sing with the sounds of these words

Stuck between teeth, yet longing to be heard

Drink though you dream about death through the night

Song of my soul lolls you from fight

Grow while you whither, dance, fade away

Reckon we ain’t gonna find more to say

Me & Mama

Me & mama up in the tree house

I creep around the corner to spy on her crying

One of us quiet as a mouse, the other sad and delirious with longing and lostness

What ill trouble we bring each other

I creep outside around back to build a nest

For the baby birds and me to start a new family

Someone among us, oh mama, remembers death too often

The other, who likes to play in the trees, knows only ‘now I feel’, ‘this I need’ and ‘here I am’

If vengeance were ours

We have all

eaten

this betrayal

before

Tastes of

old upholstery fibers inhaled

and finished cedar

A man

Robs

a child

of innocence

and feels fucking great about it

If we had talons

and beaks

Or eight arms with sharp knives

we’d sever

his hands

his penis

his tongue

pluck out his eyes

and slash his skin or burn it

but we’d leave the ears

on that mutant molester

How come?

Y’all know why

One day, lover

One day I may take you for granted

And feel no thud against my chest at the sound of your voice

One day, lover, this hearty and robust body may turn coldly away from your touch

With such a knowing, a contemptuous familiarity

But for now, my sweet brown eyed man

I sink my teeth in your skin with relish

And remain sleepless until your attentions are spent all only on me

On the Beach at Night Together

On the beach at night together

The lovers, neither modest nor young, sing with their hearts to the darkness

As one looks at the stars, the other the reflection of the moon on the water

And I consider the broken, un-rhyming verses of my favorite poets, long dead

Who before my birth learned the secret to cleave soul from body, and possibly, to see the face of God

 

 

 

Girlfriend

I know you, beautiful woman

You smile and I smile with you

Wave your hand, yes I’m coming

To witness you brush your hair

To help you plait it pretty

To sit in the kitchen as it fills will smells of baking love

Our faces get close as we talk in small whispers

Our personhoods dissolve by secret sharing

We drink and laugh past midnight, we

Sing songs of the other that becomes the self