Is this thing on?

we have saved a place for you at the table of peace beyond pressure

where you can get your mind right and bless somebody

your name is written in hieroglyphics in the book of life near the entrance

where the maître d' has been practicing to make sure

he pronounces it correctly

we are anticipating your arrival like the third of the month and believe

that all you have to say will result in the long awaited meeting

between us and our ends

we want you

give voice to all that we have yet to remember about ourselves

carry us over and we'll return the favor every night

sing the work of our own hands, that divine refrain,

and in the morning we will seize the atmosphere as Black gods who lynch

boxes of s-curl and no-lye relaxers

leaving them dangling from the charred branches of "nigga ain't shit"

and "you act just like your goddamned daddy"

but for tonight, take my seat, the two of you

straddle and ride a full-bellied Kehmet

into an existence beyond death squads and pharmaceutical colonization

last seen uncovered on a flat bed of hiv statistics

and gun supplies in the missionary position

fix you a plate of present fathers and mothers who can be believed

without blood tests

burn poverty's sadhouse

use the last vestiges of a slave mentatlity for kindling

douse it in gender roles

light it with a bitch

and knowledge will rise like the sweet smell of a thai sativa

in a peach optimo tortilla

love will knit you a crown of vines

and the last charge against you will be 

free

(the moment is the stuff of which dreams are made, the key ingredient in the making of new ones)

And this is why I have come.  This is what I'm here for.  For the pure, green sheet of a life renewed.  For life renewed.  This is the prize for having survived the winter of love, for remaining upright when the skies laid down and cried, for capsizing but not sinking.  I held out, continue to hold on to the promise of new moments to make my life with.  As a god should.

What is forgiveness in this moment?  Forgiveness is settling into comfort, allowing ease to have its perfect work.  Forgiveness is not grieving, not crying, not shadow boxing my way through imaginary trials for actual crimes committed long enough in the past to not taint this pristine present.  Forgiveness is allowing a pristine present.  Forgiveness is the uncluttered mind space.  The space to psychologically breathe.  Forgiveness is the therapy of breath.  Forgiveness is the lightness of being.  Forgiveness is burden free.  I feel forgiven, must feel forgiven, to forgive.

I have given myself plenty of time to do this.  A full year to make the journey.  I intend to take my time.  I will have each moment of this, record as much as I can bring myself to write, that when I have attained the difficult I will remember how.  I want to be transformed and am only now realizing that I am the one who must bring it about.  Realizing the work that the task demands.  Taking my time to get it right.

I hold the tinkling solitude, sparkles of sound, epiphanies of light and hope, the comfort of this writing posture, the wait for the clear thought, the crystal words chiming the notes only I know bent as I am to curl into alone.  It is the space between heartbeats that keeps me solid.  Reminds me that I'm still here.  Still working through this.  The keeper of what has been is me.  The sole historian of what and where I have been before I became this, here.  I tell it in the space between.  The solitude I have held warm in my mouth for just such a time as this.

I am free to love this.  Free to hold this like a treasure made of whale bone, handed down through sacred ceremony to me from my foremothers whose whispers can still be heard within it, keeping its surface always warm to the touch.  This is a word painting.  The gently grooved brush strokes recalling the beauty of the process in colored relief.  This is the beautiful making.  The bubbling cauldron is alive.  The sides are no longer locked with cold inaction.  I am living.

Harmony beyond peace is not tolerance of but, rather, the welcoming of all my disparate parts.  It is what it means to greet the darkness with arms open, to love the death, the dying, as much as the leaping life, the joyous living.  Harmony is the space between the notes, what defines the tempo, keeps the pace so that none are too pressed upon.  Harmony is the sanity that keeps us more alike than unalike when we are oppositional, defensive, afraid.  Harmony is allowing "we are more alike than unalike" to be true.  Harmony is believing that it is.

In the forest of me the vines tangle as they wind around branches, knitting each tree to those around it.  There are no separating oceans making foreign shores, no dividing cuts, no furrowed valleys between mountains.  I am the continent of my familiar, the continuum of what I began, of what I have always been - alive.  A life living out loud.  And do any of us have the privilege of secret?  Even the butterfly wing cannot flutter without being found out.  We are all troubling the waters, each of us a bubble rising and falling from the boiling surface.  Being God is unavoidable.  Even for those that don't see you, will not look for you, you are. Ever.

Roots run thin fingers through the scaled crust.  They curl beneath the shield made of hundreds of tiny panels of silent distance that want to be a wall called Forgotten when they grow up.  Their tips find me first, hairline queries that fracture the hard pressed clay.  There is more to this intricate design than the baked surface.

The answer is I am here, that I have been wounded, that I am mending.  The truth is that I am doing the best I can with what I have and actively releasing what I cannot hold.  What has left never to return is what I want no parts of.  No memories.  No remnants.  The truth is I'm learning the language of a new way.  I am learning how to spell love with life's letters.  I have crossed the borderlines of my own making.  I am making my own way.

Alone is a prism that casts a different jeweled light with each sunlit caress.  In the span of a breath it is the treasured gift and the broken promise.  Alone is the ugly face that softens to beauty the longer we look upon her, the uncomfortable shoe that gives and loosens its clench the longer we stay in it.

I am telling myself what I know so that I will not forget it when the torrential winds disrupt the beat, when rain turns out the light.

Forgiveness is allowing the words "I loved him" to inflate to their full shape and blow away, not biting them off at first scent, spitting them into a pit and setting them on fire.  Forgiveness is "Yes, I loved him."

I am the safe house, where it is okay to bow.  I am in a place with no precedent.  A new beginning.  This is mine, untouched by ghosts with no respect for altars.  This is the prize I have longed for: to be whole.

And whole I am.

It is in the quiet

she sings her loud songs

slamming against the walls

that do nothing in return

will not bend or care

It is in the dark

that she sends forth 

screaming rays of light

that are never bright enough

to last the night

It is in the softness

that she clenches teeth

setting edges sweet

against glass

cracking again

She is cracking again.

Your glinting eye bends light like boomerang

sending back what should be left alone to fly.

This is not the cinema screen lit

for entertainment and big enough to hold it.

These are bones barely covered with soft skin growing hard

from concrete play and survival.

Jutting from short pants, dusty socks

they were not brought out for display

but to carry from room to door

from door to stoop fro stoop to

walk where friends smile with arms to gather

giving home to boys.

These are our streets

where the discards of government

transform into "assistance" and we learn

from bottle cap abaci and stick ball.

Here we feed friends

protect them from the flint of cloud pale eyes

What are you looking at?

When she opens

and the shores of life's first body

water's mother, the magic elixir

makes sides slippery untenable

for all but the surest feet,

you'll know why the blues

wail.

The beautiful secret of love is that she is love,

that the hope of fists and jaws unclenched,

is the infilling of her holy spirit.

The gaps fill with the liquid light

of crevices effortlessly discovered

filled with the tinkling feet of laughing jumpers

unafraid of the dark.

The scars mapped with the feather tip

of a scholar's heart when the theory

has endured to law [we must be]

heard the song and eased into soft skin

when discolor let the beauty of mercy fold in.

Love is: I'm home. [again and again and again]

Somewhere close to the end

I start to appreciate the green beginning.

From the center I see

the value of the circumference.

I would not know enough

had I feared the glistening edge of too much,

the tumbling fall, the patient rocks,

impaling and indifferent.

I was pushed from the nest by a mother

who knew where wings belong.

Gave them to me.

Knew I had watched her take off and land long enough.

Would do it better without her.

The land-locked will gather

the feathers I could not keep

to adorn the sacred costumes

above their wing'ed feet

as I survey the shores of memory

to rise again like heat.

I have heard insults,

suffered ignorance,

and walked away better

having not stooped to pick up

a similiar sharp stone.

I have hiked hours,

followed narrow trails

three miles outside of nowhere

just because

it was beautifully there.

Now, convinced I have found

a better vice,

this addiction to my own impotence.

My eyes burn

like salted, sandpapered wounds

at hours made of the melted ends

and beginnings of days.

Hiccuping syllables

in familiar ways

discovering words only after the landing,

and wondering

why I left the light on to write

at this cobalt time of night.