I have thought myself born out of contempt & fear is my body intimately asking to have its breasts fondled / for what is not enough / is what can come and lose its way / inside meaningfulness // and a seed falls into a belly / a tree has sung its way into the roof of my voice / in the name of my father / a dirge for dying things flittering past the loneliness stuck in my eyes / not for what dies / but for what takes time to fade into tenderness / to survive in metaphors / such as to fear is to mis-prison love. I find myself caught in songs of my father / my father isn’t in this song / in this glory / I think some things deliberately lose direction / to be curdled into love / as what did not come // from the wind of a flooded sky / the sea starts to shift into earth / and I ask where the scourge is / if above or beneath as to say in me / racing feet — under standstill head // & the loneliness of god / is the over-staring image of hunger / these are troubling times / my mother like mangled silica allows herself to be swept / into polishing languages / till her edges smoothed / to cut half a yellow sun into my eyes / stabbing my shadow with a costly reflection. & so everytime I called my father’s name / I kept a promise of rinsed hungers between my thighbones / a definition strung off empty papers / pressed into forever like it meant always // still backhanded / I walk into my mother’s mouth as something that has come before / this bent bark, a pithed syntax / this penumbra, a swelling parenthesis. love is an unending barrel / goodbye isn’t always / which is why I can say I love you / when a bullet still pierces your body inside my eyes / a body is a failsafe of hungers // a man has died in my dream again & a boy bleeds for something he won’t have / his hands are sticky but can’t hold the dark too long / to see himself become patient with the reality of blood / without harming the world // my grandfather was an immigrant / he lived inside the eve of his skin / I was the dawn / my father called me useless / and I sew these words into my skin / stony / used outcast for escaped / to be built into a road waiting for war in the womb of a city // & this is proof of excellence / that my father’s bitterness is borne / beyond me / when my shadow has no parent. and then I knew / that when a blackboy was to speak of exile / he spoke of himself / anywhere but lost / because, whenever he thought himself lost / he was a loss outside nothing. I am not the things I ask for / filing the sky into rain / a stranger once looked at my body / and said this is the ark of god // he just called me brother / he just called me sea / he just called me sky / he just called me calendar / february like a boy sits with a lacuna in his eye / to drown in the residential grief of silence / a man dangles off his own skin / holding a house / apart / apart / a part / born out of contempt.

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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