today i noticed

i

people who never allowed
themselves to grow skin
find paper cuts trifling and trivial.

ii

so much pain
I can’t even remember

tendons, muscles,
arteries, or my own skin.

and here comes the old guard,
champagne glasses in hand

ready to stand up and testify
to the obligations of being

“drunk walkers”
protecting my rights

to enjoy being
mindlessly out of control

in neighbourhoods where White folks
shiver visions of our Apocalyptic lives...

through their own myopic
vases of wilted Physostegia Virginiana.

Still, now, Aunt Barbara grafts
my plasma and ephemera

to meaty algorithms.
Be joyful, she whispers

to my squishy grape eyes,
Lift your glass. LIVE!!!

iii

my son said:

"the colour yellow makes me want to throw up."
brown people are icky-sticky."



neatly folded paper
shopping bags,


pressed evening primroses,
single malt scotch

honey combs in clear
jars, Chilean chardonnay,

Catopsila Argante Phoebis
dry tender your wings

release.
add

the books,
the word,

the stories. never swirl
the flesh around love. is

organic.

iv
consensual reality.
Forever and now

Babby was Snow White
who else would we have

chosen? light, lovely
happy, we are . Artful

Dodgers and reptiles
cleaning this sacred

ground. churning
exits tunnels

and dreaming.
“I saw Grandmother drunk once.,

after great grandmother's funeral.
and then, weird. Uncle Brian

came back to my dorm room
and smoked all of my friends up.”


screaming and screaming and
screaming laughter now

today i noticed

a boy - enwombed by his father -
roller blades into peace

despite screaming and screaming
and screaming the happenstance

of my deadly discovery.
every flesh memory

transcends.
the hullabaloo

my mother never tells me
people die. like her best

friend. doesn’t want a witness.

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