I come from a musical place
Where they shoot me for my song
And my brother has been tortured
By my brother in my land.
I come from a beautiful place
Where they hate my shade of skin
They don't like the way I pray
And they ban free poetry.
......
A Letter To My Aunt Discussing The Correct Approach To Modern Poetry
To you, my aunt, who would explore
The literary Chankley Bore,
The paths are hard, for you are not
A literary Hottentot
But just a kind and cultured dame
Who knows not Eliot (to her shame).
Fie on you, aunt, that you should see
No genius in David G.,
No elemental form and sound
......
Six monarch butterfly cocoons
clinging to the back of your throat—
you could feel their gold wings trembling.
You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
gagging to spit them out—
and a voice saying Don't, don't—
THIS is the way we dress the Doll:—
You may make her a shepherdess, the Doll,
If you give her a crook with a pastoral hook,
But this is the way we dress the Doll.
Chorus
Bless the Doll, you may press the Doll,
But do not crumple and mess the Doll!
This is the way we dress the Doll.
......
Deleted
Continue reading
Dear Unfamiliar,
Hi! Today I am 4 years old and I am in preschool!
My favorite thing to do at school is play on the swings,
And my favorite thing to do after school is hear my siblings call me frightful
And say that I look different from them.
Adults scare me.
Their eyes look at me in a mean way when my lips feel glued shut,
......
I slowly peel my toenail from the flesh of my foot.
I want to be perfection,
The very essence of obsession.
I really hate my pointe shoes.
I am colorless, yet elegant
Pain is the industry of art
With grace, I am a swan
I’m too innocent and fragile to the rigidity of my arch.
......
Maybe I hate being feminine.
I wore hoodies to hide my truth of being a woman,
But my skinny jeans tempted my hips to be seducing.
My skin was as smooth and sweet as honey,
Attracting wasps instead of bees.
It wasn’t complementary.
My color was a preference in a catalog for hire.
Only best by this date, I’ve truly been expired.
......
L, is for the way you look at me
Your eyes tell many stories, but the weight of your feelings is feathery
It’s like rush hour in my heart, I keep running into traffic jams — I think there’s been an accident.
I’ll be running late, will you wait for me?
Seeing you is a hallucination, Ctrl C, I know that.
I know you’re never there, Ctrl V.
The length it takes to pull a single strand of my hair is enough for you to disappear.
Snap.
O, is for the only one I see
......
A wordsmith please:
Language makes us human.
Communication binds us.
Poetry evokes the divine.
Un artífice de la palabra por favor:
El lenguaje nos hace humanos.
La comunicación nos une.
La poesía evoca lo divino.