Inconsolable

I can be inconsolable at times
Blinded by my own fury that jokes feel like undercuts and love feels like a joke
I wish I knew better
Kinda wish I could coast through my feelings with a warm hand nestled in the small of my back
But being touched while I'm afraid only scares me more
How damaged must you be to prefer staying that way?
Like I said, I can be inconsolable at times
With a warm smile set on fire
Spilling ashes onto the lips of everyone we come into contact with
I want to be on your flesh
I want your skin to be inscribed with my memories like braille to the fingertips of a child who can't see in image but rather in conceptual holiness
I mean, I can be inconsolable at times
Leaving my worries at the altar otherwise known as the foot of my bed
Sending my prayers to heaven otherwise known as my shower head
Looking for my God otherwise known as my own soul
I never asked for a rib but I should have
I may need that one extra layer for my heart to pound under
My flesh, my humanity makes me inconsolable at times

Anger

I gave birth to another person, a person no one knew or loved before finding her way from in between my skin.  I carried life in my womb and felt another person breathe through my own mouth.  I felt her hiccups dance underneath my rib cage.  I remember touching her skin for the first time.  I was convinced I was in heaven.  It was then that I understood the frailty of life.  It is precious and it is a gift we can never truly comprehend.  Life has a smell. It has a warmth.  It has a purpose.


That wasn't to remind you about the beauty of life but to bring you to the meaning of death.  I want to knock on God's door and tell Him sixty three years wasn't enough but who am I?  Who am I to waltz through the leasing office of Heaven and complain that this "living" situation ain't living at all?


I'm angry.  Angry to the point where it spills onto the pages of everything that used to make me happy.  Even my skin is angry, tingling with resentment and questions.  Sometimes my humanity disgusts me and I cry the anger out.  I write the anger out.  I scream the anger out and end up empty which only leads to fear because when you're empty, you're easy to occupy.


Death is like a tornado and even though they tell you to stay still and hide, I think sometimes you have no choice but to let the wind take you where it may and hope that you land safely.

Was I unclear?

I wish loving you would stop interrupting my conversation with God about morality.  It seems to me that loving you has gotten in the way of everything else.  Instead of being the reason, it became the excuse.  Conversations sounded more like "I was inconsiderate today but I love him" instead of "I love him so I'm being considerate."  Somehow, over the course of hours, days and weeks, love became the blanket statement for entertained nonsense.


So I had to move love out of the way.  I had to put it in a jar on my dresser as a reminder that I have it but left the cap on as a reminder not to use it until I had become a regular customer of kindness, respect and compassion again.  Those products had collected dust, I wasn't greasing my scalp with them regularly.  I wasn't lathering my skin in them like I used to.  I wasn't taking care of myself, nor you and I had let maintenance lag where love was concerned.  And like anything you don't use, the kindness, the respect and the compassion  started to evaporate, started to move into the thin air like the same I love yous like oil off of kissed skin.  


I looked at you there in the shadow of the television and I realized I hadn't loved YOU before.  It was as if love was a conversation we had, one that we kept having and so I found nothing else to do with it but to  keep addressing it, keep believing it, but the repetition stopped me from actually living it.


It was in that moment, in which you were truly unlovable, like maggots feasting on my brown flesh, I felt empty.  And suddenly before I could open up my empty soul and my full mouth of angry words and distasteful thoughts, it was as if I had bathed myself in kindness, respect and compassion.  Subsequently, I stepped onto love and stood firmly on it, instead of having it hovering over me and my once ill decisions.  I started loving you then, loving all of you, in your vicious humanity and your innocent morality.  I was actively loving you.  


It was better of me to love the worst of you.
So when you ask me, why I chose you, I will respond the same way every time.


Was I unclear when I said I love you?

Ice

I hate ice.
It can be so destructive and damaging.  Relentless.
Tearing through ship hulls 
Freezing warm veins
Turning flushed faces into blue memories
I hate ice.
It can cause so much damage.  Rip right through you and then melt
Melt away like it was never there
Like it never kissed you with death on its fingertips
Like you were never submerged in it watching the sun peak through its depth
It melts away like it never hurt you
Like it never broke the flesh 
Like it never existed
Like its loud crackle wore a quiet smile
Ice.
I hate it.
For disappearing once all the damage is done
And you know what they say
No weapon, no murder
So nobody pays for it
Nobody asks it for justice for your deflated body
For your stone cold organs
For the sunrise you will never see tomorrow
I hate ice.
That cuts deep enough to make you bleed only to dilute the very mystery of your own tragedy
I hate it.
I hate it and some men….
Some men are like ice.

Love

I know the most beautiful man.  I love him even when I don't know how.

Ripe

My soul is ripe with you
Breasts flushed like sweet mangoes too busty to sit still on anybody's writhing branch
I came to you as barely a seed of indecision 
Mocked by thicker trees and darker bark
Embarrassed that the sun took the time to notice me
You wrapped me in the flesh of your charm
Squandered your warm breath on the likes of me
And I stood still
I spilled into the crumbling pieces of you praying to be absorbed and clung to you thick enough to become the foundation of something I could be proud of
There I laid, wet wit your sustenance
Growing between the rolling of your palms like my grandmother's dumplings
Reading between the lines of your hands leaving scriptures behind instead of fingerprints
But every teacher tires with frustration when their student doesn't learn as fast, doesn't grow as tall and doesn't love as monogamously as instructed
I grew nonetheless
Living and breathing in new thought
Danced in the living room to the drum of your heartbeat
Took so much of you into myself that I saw your face in my mirror, along my thighs, in the curve of my wrists, and to the bones in my ankles
My former train of thought taught me that love is someone you can see in the future, but under your lesson plan, I believe love is seeing someone everyday
In every part of you
From every part of you
I loved my teacher but I hated him too
Resented him for the long nights he kept me up
For believing that I could be anything more than I already was
For taking me apart piece by piece even if that was the only way to rearrange my soul
My soul is ripe with you
My heart beats through the ridges of bite marks you left behind
I'm full of you
Overflowing with the smell of you coming through my pores
Your smile bearing itself through my veins
I am ripe of you
Even when I'm wrong, I'm ripe of you
I am you.  I became you.  Even when you warned me that you could never date yourself.


The ripest fruit fall the hardest.
I am laid at your feet, looking up at you, in a bitter punishment, loving you still, hoping that everything you taught me isn't more important than what this love is supposed to teach you.

Alone

I wish I could tell you what love was or is rather
A combination of sweet and sour moments bound by lying lips and forgiving souls
With men who would rather break your heart and women who would rather lie to protect it


I had a dream I walked in with my sins
With my shoulders slouched by the weight of them 
And my body torn apart by the shape of them 
Bold moments, sharp edges scraping the smoothest of flesh 
With dramatic, extravagant whispers that you have bend so close to me to hear that you realize I smell nothing like myself
I wanted to tell him that I cried last night
But that didn't fit anywhere in his conversation 
He was too thrilled to notice that my voice was too shrill
To notice that my joy for him wore the overcast of the sadness from myself within
I wanted to tell him that I screamed into my pillows last night
But there was no room for that between his promotion and his big move
I had to smile through gritted teeth with nightmares in my cheeks
I wanted to tell him that I was dying inside
That I was rotting and though I was never one to like flowers delivered to my desk, he might as well send a bouquet because that's where my funeral would be held
I wanted flowers from him
I wanted candlelight dinners from him
I wanted weekend trips to Vermont from him
I wanted five minutes from him to distract me from being me
No one ever tells you that even in your relationship, you will end up casting absentee ballots 
Sometimes your vote won't count
Sometimes your oval office runs nothing but away
Sometimes instead of feeling like the first lady, you will end up the last resort
I wish I could tell you what I couldn't tell him but everybody knows you're supposed to tell your boyfriend first, even when he makes you feel second.

Sex, Life and Love

Someone told me to write about sex.


I can't forget the way he smiled
Like pine on the neck of a king, he was too sculpted not to be considered a work of art
He was too colorful not to be considered my very own landscape of emotions
He was too rigid not to be considered the terrain of my past lovers
I mean, he was too real not to disturb all the falsities I encountered
And I loved him in a sickening way
Letting our thighs tangle between each other
Forcing my nails into the flesh of his back
Painting the lining of his cheeks with my tongue
Letting his body permeate mine like two hummingbirds to the petals of offering flowers
I made love to him
Over and over again
Till I throbbed at the sound of his name
Till I grew weak at the mention of him
Till my skin turned hot from the touch of him
He was inside of me
Literally and figuratively
And I carried him with me till the weight of our sex fell off of me like Thanksgiving day pounds and Christmas cookies
I made love to him from the root of my hair to the soles of my feet
I tell you
I fucked him till it meant something
Till my body bled from the trauma
Till my heart beat louder than the drums in the Serengeti 
Till I loved him so much that it was too strong to be considered love anymore
I loved him till love became life
And fucked him to negotiate his next life in exchange for love
I'm telling you
I ain't never had sex
I had him
His fingerprints, his breath, his sweat, his hairline, his muscles, his saliva
I had him 
Over and over again
Not until he meant everything to me, but rather till everything to me meant nothing without him.

In the Hallways

His lips stuck to my skin like glaze, moist with their freshness and marked of their betrayal.  It was as if I could taste desire on his tongue translating infidelity into something more beautiful, something more tangible.

He whispered into the cheek of my mouth that he had left something for me there that I could go back to if I were ever hungry.  His saliva poured itself into my mouth like buttermilk into the flatness of hungry tongues and it was then, that my soul’s hunger was satiated.

He was nothing but a messenger, only seen in the dark hallways of my father’s estate.  I would catch glimpses of him like runaway slaves by the shaking leaves of quiet trees.  Even then, something about him intrigued me.  The stride of his long legs often had me peering from behind my bedroom door, inhaling the very wind he left behind.  I thought myself too proper of a girl to desire a man that felt he worked for me.  Yet, I was not his employer, just a witness to his duties as my father’s apprentice.  He was to be next in line as a master of scholars, sharing his intelligence as if it were DNA to the starving wombs of women yearning to be mothers.  Though looking at him, you could never tell if he was smart.  His face was too calm to ever show that he was in deep thought like Einstein or W.E.B. Dubois.  His eyebrows were never wrinkled with the idea of formulas and he never looked like he was wondering if gravity had anything to do with me falling in love with him.  His intelligence must have been so mighty that it was sacred and so I decided the most genuine of things hide in plain sight as to never be hunted.

The day we made love, there was snow on the ground, painting the streets with the brush of Michelangelo, riddled with purity.  I didn’t want to step foot outside whilst the only miracle I wanted to witness stood in the house with me.

“Evan, may I speak with you for a moment,” I whispered between the lines of oak wood in the foyer.

“Sure, I’ll be right there.”

A few minutes later, the creaking door rest under his hand as he walked into my room.  I stood there, in my pure nakedness eyes wide open as I watched his book fall from his free hand.  He closed the door behind him and tilted his head to the left as to make sure that what he was seeing was right.

“You must be cold for sure.”

“Not at all, with the sun walking through my door.”

“You’re not supposed to get too close to the sun though.”

“Before today, the sun never had arms like yours,  arms that look like they can reach out to the earth and press its continents against its own warmth.”

“It is true, I have always desired to hold the world in my two hands.”

“It is also true that word becomes flesh,” were the last words I spoke before I was engulfed into his broad frame.  He turned me around to face the window as his right hand swept across the nape of my neck, down to the curve of my breasts, to the smile of my waist and the tidal waves between my legs.  The nerve endings in my soul began to perk up like dandelions to the wind and I left pieces of myself stained to his flesh.

As he submerged his body into mine, it became known to me, that I was deep in his love like coral reef lining the ocean floor.  No matter how the waves turned and how angry the currents could be, I would never be lost within the very force that owned me.  I was his for a lifetime and dealt to him in the proportion of that moment. 

The Devil's Playground

It's been a while since I've opened my computer.  I was probably too afraid to see what I would write considering what life has brought to my front door lately.  I've learned a few things about myself and a little more about others.  There were some days where I retreated so far into myself that I couldn't see God looking back at me.  And there were other days, that I was so far outside of myself that I watched God edit the creation of me from a distance.


It's funny how we spend our lives calculating who we would die for, never really anticipating the day to actually arrive and yet I wake up every morning trying to make good on that favor.  "Take me instead" are three words way more powerful than "I love you." But this is just me waking up every day with my body flung on an empty altar waiting for God to check his messages.


I see that some people have no God in them.  That sounds as stale as concrete in the ghetto and as harsh as alcoholic mothers in the suburbs but it's true.  And it wasn't till I found God, that I realized how real the devil is, how hungry the devil is, how f.cking persistent the devil is.  When my friend asked me, well if you know the devil, doesn't that mean you'll know God? I answered no because the devil will be whatever you need him to be to convince you to do some sh.t you shouldn't be doing.  The devil will pretend to be God if he has to but God never changes.  God weeps in the same magnificence as always.  So I believe, that you can recognize the devil once you've found God, but ain't no God where the devil plays.


Maybe that was too much spirituality and maybe I'm searching for God because humanity can't heal everything but the truth of the matter is, God has requested my full attention.  There's been a pause put on my life for me to redirect my energies, align my priorities and grow from the inside out.  Maybe that wasn't the purpose of the pause, but that's what it has done so far.


I spent so much of my time wondering if God was hearing me and know I feel like God is spending so much of His time redecorating my space and screaming, "Tass, do YOU hear ME?"  I wouldn't be surprised if God was a Leo.  


I say all that to say, I miss y'all.  I miss hearing your voices and seeing your faces at different events.  I miss laughing at bars and two stepping into a diner at 3am but maybe I'll be a better woman at the end of all this, maybe I won't.  But either way, one day, I'll be yours again.