To Wish, To Pray
Sometimes, I wish that I could wish away my frolicking youth,
clasping together my then worn sun-weathered hands in prayer,
grateful for all I had, thankful for the bountiful harvest.
I long to see the joy of being unmoored,
hopeful of life’s beginning,
as carefree as a warm spring breeze,
carried towards horizons I can’t imagine now.
Lying in Fire’s Truth: Because of Anansi
I am a spider.
No. More than that.
I am a spider braver and wiser than your griot.
He told me this himself at dawn.
Black Rose
What could have caused such a grotesque deformity?
I always answer you
in a language you refuse to hear,
from roots you try to curse,
with beauty you fail to acknowledge.
The Free We
We are the Forgotten
Poem’s children.
We drink ground morphemes distilled in alkaline water,
gurgling syntaxes pooling in our saliva.
Primordial stardust
coalesces into the hornets
that swarm and rage in our small intestines.
That sting is our fuel.
A Writer’s Faith
I try to carve her
from hallowed words in my thesaurus,
but maybe she isn’t one person.
Perhaps she is a chorus
of harmonious dissonances
gurgling from honeyed ash-like timbre choices,
one shared mosaic face
with a kaleidoscope of voices.