Soooo.. I date black girls
It all started with her velvet pumps.
A cinnimon-tinted woman
Gift-wrapped in crimson
With a laugh that reeked of Chicago

It was September 2006.

And I’d just met the first love of my life.
And I had just met the first ex-girlfriend of mine.

I was knee-deep in a relationship headed for Katrina:
All tragedy and no glory,
Full of shell-shocked hugs and a blonde bombshell,
Who knew much more about blowing smoke than what it took to hold me down.

I’d been waiting for years to find a weightless woman;
More tattered than torn;
More vine than thorn;
A mix of Cinderella.
Molded by God to be my thirteenth rib.

I never thought that someone to lay still with was too much to ask for.

So I prayed nightly
For a wife wiling to carve this rolling stone into a rock she can rely on.
Fashioning her arms as airplanes
And accepting my baggage along with the rest of me.
A beautiful mason with building blocks in one hand
And a grip full of wind-washed memories in the other.

We all have different reasons for trying to feel whole,
For wanting our bodies to be more than babysitters to our souls.

A lifetime of heart ache pressed between your back and my tears
A daycare where I can be myself on the playground.

I will be the key to a gate in your heart/chest that you don’t even know exists.
Whispering, in a voice only loud enough for your spine to hear
Open your rub cage, my lover
Show me what sparkling opera you have hiding in there
Sing me a bridge to the moment you forgot how to breathe
The moment when all of this feels like a footnote to embrace
An essence so beautiful it can only be read on the sunniest of days
Because we both know what it feels like to be cut off at the knees.

So I’ll start by patchwork quilting your shins with my lips
Teach you how to stand again
How to throw rocks at moving cars
I want this to be reckless.
They’ll have to scratch their heads, and pass it off as organized chaos.
A silly string masterpiece that only you and I could have created, that you are a Picasso
Being shredded over Mozart’s 9th Symphony.

We all have different reasons for smiling at the sun.

Mine just happens to be you.

So let’s pretend that gravity is just an inside joke we have with the ground.
Grab me like a drunken bouncer
And hold on for dear life
I promise I won’t let you fall.

Because I’ve been dropped before.

And a broken violin of vocal cords, voice limping on stage
After losing a bout with my lover’s temper
A weeping microphone in the middle of Carnegie Hall
A mouthless star, clipped wingless,
Grounded.
And you jump shot in the middle of Madison Square Garden,
A Saturday morning trainwreck.

But love shouldn’t feel like an accident.
Like two highspeed hearts crashing;
Burning;
Mistaking the sparks for stars.
And I can no longer settle for love that won’t last.
Living life as a condor in a coffin, married to the mud.
When I was promised the clouds.

So I won’t.

I’m done for searching for love in shoeboxes.
Closed cardboard cages for dirty souls.

So I fashioned my eyes as kaleidoscopes
Never forgetting to thank God for the woman in the supermarket,
or the lady on the street corner.

I’m a paint-splattered realist.
Who’s finally ready to put the brush down
Spread my wings
Lift my well-worn feet off the ground
And finally
Fly.

Poem by by Joshua Bennett & Justin Reilly

 

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