I conceived you in my heart. Nine months was nine lives riding on an eternity that was nurtured in us. Seven times before I went for mine, to spin jewellery and the world, and your head is gone. Half the time between the world and you. You thought it was. You. And I. The World is yours. Don’t lose your heart. Again.
Cutting in. You want out. Got off the chair, and you’ve been racing to the start. It was never yours to own. A fault like a bone, you were never theirs to scorn. Just backed up in decisions and the barb is a wheel to the wire. Closest shave was the kindness for his kind. Yours in kind and candid to the skin that a blade would kiss.
Crying skies can’t hide from the sight of bredrin’s backfaced accusations played with the mute. Shift work. You got all the baggage in the skin hanging off her lies. Do you know how the thief negotiates for the crimson kiss before closing time?
I’ll tell you a secret. An open heart dies before it learns to close its eyes. For bad. And lives before it overstands to keep you out of mind, folded and tucked away from the words she didn’t keep. You were right and wrong to not keep her broken jar of sugar and fantasy. Empty words. Selfish belongs in the ocean with them and other strings, wounds and things of unknown possibilities. She goes this way. You go that way. Out of hers. Closed. For good.
Where to. Going. Expediently.
Where from. Coming. Cosmological.
Where now. Owing. Everytime you leave is a return.
A banker. Loaning a teller. Waiting at a table. Tailor is sacred as cloth talk for dress made face time.
Savage.
Time lives rent free. And richer still than a free man who is owned by home. Running to pay for permission to live by licence.
Lawful. Unwedded bride taken by the L. Lawfully cold to a touch.
Found. Racing to die by returning the favour.
Pleasing is the plated tongue. Golden. You’ll house me and the thighs that spread like the gut of a gluton.
A believer. Till undone. All lives in a sentence to command the fool to stop. Landing is not the feat. Foot in arms, not so fast, I’ll be on time when you get there.
Here. Is fortune. Lost. For certain and unsentimental.
A hanging leaf puts its heart on the line to be noticed.
We’ve only made eye contact.
Soon to touch.
I wouldn’t dare to try and save a hanging leaf.
Soon to fall….
Please don’t watch.
Inside. You are an outsider and the room knows it. You do not belong to them. The walls stiffen in defence of the inflammed human heart that is present. You will never be of them. The wall knows this fate you bet your fears on. Too swell. Tooth picked. You tilt your hat before they turn you down. You haven’t asked anything of them. Yet. The floor sucks on the sole of your swift footed analysis. Daring you to overthink the feeling that is stirred up in the forest of invention. An idea. What is an idea? Just like us. And nothing alike.
Wet of eyes, the paint sounds the welcome. They despise her too. And her ghosts. Colours come for real. Want all the sparks. All the action that imagination can fire up. They want you to want them too. And you know how they like it. The thickness. The trust in the thrust. The oh so bitter sweetness of us at our worst best. You would buy them if you didn’t already own their desire to have you or the image they paint of you in reflection. And what are you?
Outside. You are an insider with no throne room for Benin’s bronzed hypocrisy, but space for double bedded love making with case sensitive words for a thousand books and one. You make the way, they see through you, what they think you are and never were. Rust of Scarlet, blood conscious to a fault, who would have doubted the waters that ushered you into this world? If you were I and I knew how to speak, I would not paint you into the absence of mind that silence suggests. You haved loved loudly in your time, and the ground will not forget, even if you are never spoken of. All love is memorial but all is not lost. Except to time, when bound to art and held captive by the memories of those we have longed for. And have hungered to know intimately, the internal walls of our lover’s throbbing heart without the shades on.Â
Breaking through to be inside of you and all you aspire to breathe out into damnation when you dreamed us into the merciless canvas of mortal life and the infinite glory of Agape. How cruel, the truth convicts the dead as though they were sentenced to life in unfinished paragraphs. We have only fallen in love with ideas and risen in the acceptance of our fallacies. The multiverse. The continents. The ocean of oceans that we are. It carries all the Hell and Heaven that resides in us. With us. For we are hung up in the awakening terror of love’s gallery for the broken and torn apart.
While I was tinkering and thinking about whether a Blues guitar solo should share amicable space with an alto saxophone on a number, I was captured by this captivating photograph of Tsehai Essiebea Farrell which led me on a great train of thought for the lyrics to come. Ethiopia had been on my mind recently because of a conversation I had with a great Ethiopian Artist about an awakening he had. A revelation about his place in the world, his vocation, and the micro of the worlds within his wider perception. So much of the telling if not the toiling of life, both in our written past and living present, has much to do with our vantage point and the dubious nature of our muscle memory where matters of the tender heart are concerned. Uncomfortably numb but our eyes never tire of seeing and being seen. Or do they? Do they know? Do they look in on us and play our hand against better judgement? Our windows remain the seducer and the seduced, for perpetuity. It can seem that way. And what is seen is unseen. What is known is a mystery as I am to you. Always the stranger from eye to eye. Yet familiar in some kind of way. Never fully known.
Only one hand works but two is company. To feel the resistance of a hand that does not obey the head. To reconcile. I wore a cast for years. I drained the fluid. It returned within minutes. It refuses to be compliant. It hurts me all the time. Since I was 8. But it has taught me a lot. It defies me. And I defy it. That is our harmony.
As the world rises down in flames, there is still the possibility that our hearts can remain open. Blood binds us all. A transfusion of possibility. That’s the one drop rule that men born of women did not need to legislate for it to be true.
My empathy rides the crocodile. My tears hold me accountable. Protect my hope. Love is a protest, witnessing in the dark with the delinquents who make a claim for the light. I dare to see you. Not through you. Where you crawl. Where I hide. Marrow of bone. Matter of life. A bridge between aspiration and despair. I’ve climbed your timeless stories that tell of what you saw before you knew. Babies. Your babies. Before you knew them. Before you saw the world through their eyes.
Wash me with your eyes my love, once more, before you take me to bed, that I may sleep beside your returning curiousity that turned me out.
I am unclean from feet to follicle, yet the unfed Raven nests on my crown of crumbs but she does not eat off me like the hands I once held inside my womb shaped heart when you hungered for my touch. Nurtured us in longing with the wettest kiss mistaken for hope.
My locks have been divided by fangled thieves of circumstance who add up my time and subtract me from you. The temple has been desecrated since I allowed you to enter me, with the gentle force of your indifference. And I have only you to wear though worn out by the distance between us.
Then become me, so that I am forever yours.
Napoleon Dozier's Dabbler's Hand 