You’re brown like mush
At the end of the seasons
Which change temperature like you change colors.
Shaped by soil into an accessory of a
Sultans cap, you fall down on our
Heads and when you’re all gone
The openness makes the concrete clear, giving way a path for the rain.
Lovers walk over you instead of walking
On each other and children
Jump into you, whole pies scattering.
Someone sweet tells me you stole life
From the sun, measured in smiles. And I try and watch
Your movement for a while, to catch you
In the act. But you don’t move,
Only curve slightly to absorb the sun and bring life back down to us.

The sun peaks over a woman’s hips,
Fat sitting around like pockets of pre-birth
Preparing for the opening.
Held at the waist,
As a powerful grip on ownership or claims,
my practiced pouches of cancer sift in pink tissue
Fearing the grip.
We are dangerously animalistic in the act of
Thought out innocence with
The height of thickness, like the hair on arms
Or puberty.
They say man creates the body now, and God the mind
but who knew minds don’t have to think alike to set records
With limbs
And
False contact?
See, you caused no stir in me, still grasping the spaces in between
Wandering to and from obsessive touch.
Those collisions are rare,
Sparking the effortless breath between
Metal on metal.
There’s the scientific equation for everything.

I used to write poems about the things I saw,
Finding inspiration in the smallest observances
Like the way my mother said my name
Or the taste of my very first Barbie lip gloss.
I used to write poems with the concreteness of family living,
About the anxiety of their separation or the angst
Of a father’s brothel.
I used to write things other than love poems,
Like a focus on my best friends laugh or the meaning of shock in
The phrase ‘culture shock’.
When I met you, I stopped writing poems,
And I turned them into anger instead.