And to that note, I spend a lot of time,
especially lately, with all this shit going on,
you have friends who are struggling,
you have people who are good people,
and you're wondering why we are dealing with all this shit,
you know?
And I try to be a spiritual person.
And sometimes, I really wonder if God fuck with me like that.
And I mean, if she don't, who could really blame her?
My prayers are hardly coherent, hardly consistent, too many
drunk texts, too many requests for someone
who don't call too much.
I ran out of words for God.
And I can't speak to my demons, but I hear them.
My language is never as big as my sins, my grace, my demands,
which have taken to lingering in the back of my throat.
And who can say whether God has favorites, remembers only some
of our birthdays?
Maybe she's exhausted, or maybe she's a simulation.
I never know what's real.
I never know what to believe.
I used to believe all I could have was the winter streets I
kept returning to, fades, funerals,
and the familiar cold of county.
And now, I've made a home in uncertainty.
My life is open concept.
I let the light wash through undesigned, warm enough
to murk up the mirrors.
I am mostly alone and mostly unafraid,
like a hummingbird at dawn.
September flowers are pinking in my yard,
and on my father's gravestone, too.
I sense a revolution, and many dead before a spring, ancestors
way past impatient, embracing their kin in the sky--
ancestors way past impatient, embracing their kin.
The sky was my lover.
We laid all day with each other, tried
to figure out how we could survive solo, just
the two of us.
And I don't know about you, but I can't say
what any of this shit means.
I know how to make a poem, make a thing pretty.
And so must God, but I've been so ugly, and so has she.
And I swore, when I wrote this poem,
it would be all gold and saffron.
Thought it would smell like some pine forest epiphany, at least
some cocoa butter, at least an explanation,
but these are just words.
I'm not saying I don't believe in God,
I'm just saying she ain't easy to read.
She don't respond.
She don't keep her read receipts on.
I'm saying my cousin still can't come home,
and my homies still can't come out.
And yesterday, I ate lamb and licked the blood from the plate
and laughed for an hour and everything was perfect.
And it feels like a trick.