Love should not serve as the cord of a desperate soul.

It is what is closest to my mind and furthest from my face.

Kill me dead to find me

Slain, slew slay me and I am found

My body is my body in either beauty or despair.

No chain will bind me greater

than my own ensnaring arms,

not even your Honesty that is so much to want

will thrust its hands around my neck and force me

to relinquish that bequeath unto none but I.

Not that life should be so dishonest, mind you,

but people rarely take up truth matriculating

along the borders of this shared monolithic shrine.

These are words that I write.

They don’t feel like me. They

don’t know me at all

sometimes.

I more than once

bore the gift of silence

for the trauma

of my words

like wounded vultures

writhing in the dust. 

Words are with God

and through them

God traps and transforms. 

Little niggas with more heart than Jesus, sport big ass pistols

through a land of crosses swaying in an incandescent night. 

I remember when my grandma listened

to me dance. She said it sounded like raindrops.

Snappin’ them fingers, thinkin’ nobody lookin’

invoked the rhythms of the water,

made present by the rhythm in the blood. 

A cradle of discord

deceives with tumultuous wails

from between my legs.

Sex calls honor

belonging

to mother and father.

Be in their image but

bypass their mistakes,

do as I say not as I do

and God reveals

in the language of the stones,

“Know me in them”,

do as I say not as I do.