poems about insecure attachment

there was a hole in me where

Home should be, a childhood

deep & a mother wide

my filling is praise receipts

& prayers  names crumpled days

by the handful a

megaphoned song for anyone

digital lights singing i'm still hungry

 

the hole in me a lover tall

(i told myself) and burrowed

huddle small but

she was an ontologist who spoke rainfall

named as adam did the animals

unmade monsters into nothing

my absence into absence

once, each blink destroyed the land

--to a child, everything dies at night but me

but then she gives object permanence

brown & fertile

in two cupped hands

to plant.

Platonic

there is more love

in the bus driver's thumb

when he covers the slot

it's okay, go ahead

as my card chirps from hunger

as I stall and my purse coughs

 

than the thousand soft sighs,

rising wonders and longings

forming cloudlands for dreamed selves

of downcast-eyed boys

love poems for myself

you are the cutest little boy asleep

like a heathen legs wide & sheet-tangled

a bed of rainbows & donuts & all your best friends

(are silent) no Deco artist designed you

gangly neotenous elbowed& kneed thing

til death adolescent the plaid skirt itself

breaks curfew ah! it rises and swirls

like the first ever turns red-black stripe red-black

baby-halty eyes widen

the discovery of girlhood that wet

of a body still being learned--another naked dance

for a body still being learned--the first personal language

the last cartwheel is far too distance

the sand that drips from your underfoot

is sandiegan the hands' undertan knows

the blue-brown mix of beach

(& this can be a song in Robinese)

for applemound breasts & pearbottom

peachvellum tree brown yes & blue & future blue

the afro sprouts has become a halo

of strangers' caught compliments our thought cloud

in the glow of somewhere else you carry

& will one day return to a star or sun isn't that right?

first world

what it first meant was:

the strongest buildings still announce bomb shelter

sturdy tan boxes where

before i was born

my parents cousins possible friends

learned to hear sirens and crouch under desks

 

what it really meant was a blue for freedom

like the seas between us

an arbitrary line drawn in bullet or tank track

red over there, for blood we still desire

 

what it means now is that a children's tv show

told me to save water.

i choose not to i like the fizz of its pressure,

white with excitement after brushing my teeth

& after the first spit, i cup my hand,

lower my mouth

lips to the water,

ah! how tasty how endless beautiful clean & free

there are things blackness hasn't touched

or doesn't touch

or will or should, like

 

the cork-hat or the cork-hatted man,

his sons: Irwins, Kratts, Hanna

in safari tan, all.

 

or the mother of watching, who crouches

hidden recording & watching a band

or family troop or community that--

(how does she rank them? a step above us? me a step below her?)

in the light of the college's chapel

what did she think when i raised my hand and voice:

'i think their rights are not as pressing

for now'? or the plant-fed girls seated around me

 

or the father of altruism, sitting tenured

over his envisioned drowning child,

hands forming professorial barrels

around something like 'liberation'

--i want to say he stole that word

just as his young infiltrate a farm quicker than a prison,

free cattle sooner than a man

 

before all that, i lay before the tv

(9 or younger

(legs swinging

(hair still braided)

with my animal books & a notepad

sketching the photos of roseate spoonbills

pallas cats

fennec foxes

endangered and extinct:

that whales this pigeon that tigers

i am not Black yet

when we are all beasts

 

a human onscreen talks of warmth and breasts

& i realize my mothers (& my own someday)

but i don't yet weigh men's bodies

against dogs or lions;

link the wildness of the Motherland

to my own blood

or recognize the yokes or cages & colonies in it no

 

i learn somethings of Human Nature,

build my morals it brick by fact by brick

they tell me something about tooth and claw

violent innocence green wonder

black theory has yet to address

poems about particles and/or waves

GLORY

to the dumped me

someone quoted that a good love

is one with someone who thinks the sun shines

out of your ass.

 

well i think everyone is made of starstuff

(gay enough to want to be liked by every pretty girl)

but i have once or twice seen a body where light burst unbound

from every orifice

rays freed shone enough to bask in,

irradiation that made me high

 

& the sources so?

or thanks my wife saw it first, or sees it brighter

or i don't believe you and ran

 

hey me too,

i don't yet believe i (woodhued clayborne gangly thing)

speak anything but dioxide poison

prove me wrong i tell the wait

& listen for someone's awefilled gasp

at what cosmic timeless light i hold