Real Love
Grampa said
“All hair takes care”
when he saw his
brown lil kinky-headed baby girls get
looked at differently than his
fair-skinned and snowy complected
curly and straight-haired grandbabies.
He said
“All hair takes care”
and then he would,
With the strength of
Solomon in his giant,
obsidian hands
gently wrap fire
betwixt his fingers
and,
quick as a whisper,
turn our coily-cottony hair
into spun silk,
the way his mama showed him,
so that he could show
his darker baby girls with knotty spirals,
like his own,
that all hair
takes care...
...and care was all we needed
to know we were beautiful, too.
Still.
...perhaps
you should learn to use softer
words with her
words that fall like feathers on silken ears...
...like petals on fresh snow,
whose heat melts ice flakes, warmer than
our embraces’
causation to enflame
–imperiled,
but leaving cinders carried on
smoked wafts of heat dust
gently singed, landing on
tender buds of
baby’s breath and
daffodil-lined paths
in the shape of her
well-earned heart.
...that is,
...if it’s still yours....
What
...and life is a fucking
sordid affair with false flags of intimacy
The way your stomach begins to eat itself
When you’re starved,
Love does the same with your heart–
Cannibalized.
Destroys itself by
regurgitating acidic emotions
until it renders you
unrecognizable, face smeared with blood
like
some hungry undead
and then you realize
you fucked it all up
because your heart was hangry
and you can’t put the pieces back together
cause you've swallowed most of them whole
and you’ve got to wait until they’re
digested just to see them
again.
In a porcelain bowl.