Where do I begin?

I have shut myself off

Trying not to feel

Your fingers

Criss-crossing on my back

Your lips

pausing over my body

honoring its Blackness

its Beauty

 

I have told myself

To remember the pleasure

Is to say

There was nothing more

But oh there was more

So much more

But the pleasure…

As there had never been before

Is forever stamped in my memory

I’m afraid

 

The silence we tend

In our separate ways

Hangs around like a ghost

Waiting to frighten me

Out of my own skin

The silence has healing powers

They all say

The powers they work in the silence

So I say…

Fuck the silence!

Fuck the boundaries!

Fuck learning to play the game!

I want my love back

The silence will eat me alive

Then what good the healing powers

 

I don’t seem to have

Control over my emotions

Anger and pain, sisters

Vying for equal attention

I think

I hope she’ll keep a journal this time

Then I remember…

She never felt the same way you did

 

I want to stop holding back

And just call you

As I listen to Yumbambe

And sashay

Across the kitchen floor

I wonder how you are

As I dial my sister’s number

With the same 330 area code

I pause just in case

Habit lets my fingers

Dial you instead

 

As I look around my room and smile

At how many books

I too am reading at one time

I think of you

 

I am signing up for yoga

As if that will bring you back

It’s just that all the things

I didn’t do

Because I envied you for being good at it

I am doing now

I figured now that there was no one to

Check my progress

Or

Laugh at my mistakes

Now I can do it

 

I wonder do you still feel 

the same way you did when

we split up the first time?

 

I suspect you got the card today

I’m not quite sure what I wanted you to do with it

Nothing I guess

I must trust the process

I try not to think what your family thinks of all this

Especially after you came out to them

Mine want to harm you

They did with the other one too

I guess they see my pain

 

As we did

Our staple way of checking in

at staff meeting today

I swallowed

As I realized that I couldn’t share my biggest thorn of all

Losing you

Over Christmas

Missing you

Now

The world didn’t know that

A month ago

My heart broke

And that I was still

Struggling

Looking for answers

The world couldn’t know

Because

They didn’t want to know

 

I sawBrokeBackMountain

And thru it all

I thought of you

I thought

Would I too die as Jack did

Never having fully realized

The joy of loving someone

Who loved me enough

Enough to sacrifice

Life on the mainstream

For life on the fringes

Would I still say like Innis,

“I aint no Queer!”

Because Queer was the Other

And I wasn’t Other

Was I willing to claim that

I had found love

But that it was queer?

That it didn’t come in a package

Acceptable to society

Was I willing to be

Another Other

Since Black was already an established Other?

 

I spoke to our friend today

I asked her if she spoke to you today

She hesitates

She answers

Yes

Quietly

As if feeling caught between us

I press on for more

Wondering what all

She knew

How desperate I was

To know how you were

Did you feel this upset too?

 

Was I really benefitting from

not talking to you

was my therapist right

in saying

I was doing well by cutting off correspondence

With you

If I should drop dead tomorrow

And never have the chance to reconcile

Would I be judged in heaven?

 

Work has begun

I am trying to stay busy

So I don’t think too much

About you, us

But then people ask of you

And then I begin to think all over again

How long will it take?

A lifetime?

As that poem says

A life time to forget you

Do I want to forget?

Can I forget?