Dusk, My Friend

Dusk, my sweet friend,

How I have nearly missed your warmth for another

Your sight like finding a long lost lover

I thought the rains had turned you away

Your presence alone persuade

Me not ever to forsake your love again

As long as you don’t make my heart ache.

Flight

Photo by Diogo Fagundes on Unsplash

Watch me, watch me leave this world

I am about to quit this scene

Think I won’t spill the beans

Of you leaving me before I return to sea.

See me, see me fly

Kite to your spinning wheel

This rope that tethers me still

To your grasp, O, fiendish being.

The sun is east, the moon is high

Becalm is the storm irate inside

My mind. I won’t run no more, though I

Cannot stay tied to this unredeeming love tonight.

Morning

I awake to a cluster of random thoughts

you know, the kind that plagues you every morning

that comes with gnawing fear in the heart:

Is there enough in your account to keep you afloat when times get hard?

Is that true love lying beside you in bed, or is she out out the door the instant things get rough instead?

Is that a ticking time bomb in your heart, I fear, or are you worried over nothing, I fear?

I find that if I sit still and simply breath

the fear does go away so subtly

I am free again, at least until another morning.

Weary Year

Is it January already? Gosh, won’t this month hurry up and end? I’m so tired and drained, and cannot wait for 2020 to be gone.

What a fucked-up time it is to be born. To be alive. To think that I got to see the world come to a near end.

I got to see the world burn up a temperature – nature claimed back her own. Eating up plant and being.

I saw rioting in the streets—a cop kneeling on a brother’s neck—it was so bad, even I couldn’t breathe. Folks no longer wanting to be quarantined.

Black Lives Matter flooded every city. U.N.I.T.Y reigned from city to landscape.

Brothers and sisters, the old and the young, and those who’ve been through this shit before, came out in droves and marched.

They cried, they yelled, they chanted for justice and peace.

But the protesters got gassed, and the Proud Boys flooded the city. I stood dismayed and aghast at the orange man holding up a Bible upside down, standing in front of a church he knew nothing about.

But the rebellion rages onward. Wounds once forgotten came alight in the fray. Heroes we always loved gone—Kobe Bryant; John Lewis; Ruth Ginsburg; George Floyd; Breonna Taylor—

Ever this stick in our memory as we venture forth into 2021.