surrealisting.

All I have ever done is write you love poems. Omitting the bent fork and bruised jaw that scarred our relationship.

All I have ever done is write you love poems. I felt you needed them
like pillows
like my breast in sleep
like your
dead
mother.


All I have ever done is write you love poems and even in my poems I become your defense attorney
ready to slash, cut down, burn, disqualify any accusations even if they are true because too many people want to attack you.


And I'm not about to join their tirade on beautiful, young criminals who in some other world could have been poets
or men.


But this is not about them.

This about me and you and strange things we've shared

like red hot lays potato chips,
Victoria's Secret underwear,
chocolate dime bags from Cornelia,
and too many funeral communion chips.


This is about bundles and your goddamn block and friends like Nikki who lock his girl up in Howard housing to stop her from going to school.

And this is about money.

Hell yes! I will not front on dramas of economically deprived love and how I hate paying for every $3.00 discount movie and McDonalds value meals on our cheap-ass dates
Making me think Applebees is high class!

And it's about doors, locked doors that we stood behind at a time when we could barely reach the knob.

Stretching to turn it with wet palms while some man beat our mothers and we stood on this side tussling the hair of our younger brothers.

So I cannot get over what happened last Thursday.

I cannot get over how we have become them and more.

Purple stains on my forearms
your thighs.
Small worlds of pain recorded on skin.
I fell into those worlds, under bathroom lights and dingy towels, I fell into a calm.
Seeing myself 5,15,21.

I'm a small girl
but no one
not even you
love with kill me.


But I guess I'm riffing again like you say.
And I lose my point somewhere between loving you and loving the world that hates you but baby all I have ever done is write you love poems.
When maybe all you needed was a song.
And maybe one day you will understand that this is one that starts with you and ends with myself like a love song come undone.