Verbatim

Some days I am fluent in slow fade How a candle travels Deeply through the wax Before realizing Her own demise Some nights I am fluent in cries To an empathetic moon Lamenting The part of herself Which is missing

Fingertips graze against me like stray bullets I wish I knew the comforts of Safe love The way I know my scars Like old friends warning me of my patterns They itch sometimes beneath the surface As if they never really healed right Though my body did it's best To align the skin graph Recreate the shell of flesh I was before I let these words cut into me Like a Thanksgiving turkey Carving away my insides Replacing them with delicious surrogates And a cornucopia of well intentions Almost as fake as the sweet glaze smiles we pasted onto our faces For every holiday photo Happiness feels treacherous to me Love feels like a shot in the foot Perhaps that's why every time I step into it I keep one at the doorway Ready for my grand escape As if to say I always knew it wouldn't work out anyway I always had a feeling Because when something seems Too good to be true It usually is And I'm not the kind of person To not take the risk Even if I know it runs a high chance of turning to r

I know more about lessons than I do about love. I could be a professor at Heartbreak University with a double major in Red Flags and Toxic Behaviors minor in Self Care and Healthy Boundaries. No matter the degree of separation between my words and actions still I find myself applying for yet another semester. There is something in the summer air that leaves me feeling ambitious to pick up a new course curriculum in your private study. Give me some credit I know I can be a bit extra, but I've heard I make a great homework buddy even with my history of making homes out of pieces of work. I've graduated top of my class and I'm not looking for another project. You could say I'm in the market for a reliable a lab partner well-versed in chemistry and safety precautions, unafraid to stray from the syllabus for the purpose of Higher learning. Interning with Intuition and Observation has given me the kind of work experience that looks damn good on a resume. So don't play you

Lately You've been putting that Rebel tongue To good use Lighting matchstick bars Sparking bold ideas Onto quiet lips Still, you manage to fill My chalice to brim Every morning Replacing my need For that cup of joe With a need for your Grand rising prose -Soul medicine My daily dose Has grown addicting Coursing electricity To the farthest reaches Of my extremities You set my body on fire The way destruction Can birth new life From fertile soil Hands no strangers To the toil of tending An impossible garden Prone to self sabotage You ancestors have taught How to weather Inclement conditions With resilience and nurture Don't mistake chem trails For my cloudy sighs Forcing summer streams From dry eyes I have never experienced A drought of emotion Rather cracked all my dams I've given up Holding back this ocean And there you are With open sails and compass Navigating freckled starlight To the refuge of my Cave of wonders Words have a tendency Flowing fluently From you In tolling

I have this super power To wipe away my tears With wide ruled paper And every drop That mixes with the ink Stirs clouds into my Already hazy thoughts, I think I need a coffee Caffeine Is the only drug I've been Fiending for I've been trying to wake up For a minute now Just to find myself Conscious in a world of endless Snoozing My head is pounding Pressure blinding I'm going Cyclops The next time I open these things Lazer beam shots Through the next Discus spinning In contradiction to this Already crazy story We're two Freudian slips away From functioning Anarchy Mutant Uprising Disrupting conditioned fear For now we know We are the Revolution we've been waiting for We are the vaccine to our sick society Power to the People Black lives not only matter They are an orchestra of a culture Screaming to be heard Deserving of Love And reparations -Civil Movement's Donations Contributing to "ActBlue" Who?? I don't know who to Give my two cents to Or who t

What a strange time to be alive, To be rising in Love.. There, I said it. Protected By the sanctity of our prose How they carry these words Tenderly tucked away Into the petals of blossoming romance I disclosed My struggle With the tug of war Inside me Where traumas and past conditioning Have told me This is not allowed to happen That someone's pretending About something Everything Settling For the idea of us I don't ever want to punish You for these scars Nor myself for healing still You make settling sound kinda nice Not to insinuate anything less Than everything I've ever wanted But the thought that I could plant roots In you Make a home out of the space Between your heart and your rib cage So the next time someone tries to take a shot at you I could take that bullet Into my soil The same way Cupid shot me down -bang bang And blossom into that empty clip Like flowers bandaging open wounds I used to fear the tether of the term "Relationship" Until I realized tha

Black out Boy Blue Black and blue When they leave you Vessels bruised Broken black skin Melanin stained red Across cracked obsidian Across hot asphalt Face down Sizzle in the street Stand down Pressure high Amidst the summer heat Hands up Don't shoot They aim to squeeze the juice From every berry Pulped and buried At least six feet deep Little Black Kings Granted no luxury Of innocence  Keepsake memories As soon as they hit puberty When suddenly A twelve-year-old Can appear sixteen To any badged Klansmen With their glock nineteens Have these boys wishing on candles For Benjamin Buttons disease Black out Crooked smiles Crawling wide across Porcelain skin Red hats Atop craniums Still pulsing red within Gushing with Privilege, Self righteous knowledge, Lack of compassion, And skewed perception of history "Decades?" I think you mean centuries Slave ships carried Over every ocean and sea Nappy heads without An inkling of their ancestry Still met with audacity White folk speaki