"...a black woman
in a white house
built by slaves..."

In the streets of sunrise his
Name is unknown.

Blend of dirt and vagrant
Under said bridges.
     Lowly
Living under storms.
    Stillness of hunger,
Sad, sorrowful,so wise.

    We will sit in rooms
Upon the chairs with laptops,
     Filtering his memory
That no Google search will find,
     He has no screen name.

The only backup memory
Inside his faceless book.

Very early before the birds
the morning moon travels to underworlds
gathering stars and seas of glowing pearls
when swift the sweep of darkness goes
the night from black to indigo
blue in layers, the light unravels
then wends the coming day
the dawning sky of gold.

i.

dusk melts into walls
and corners,
the sun begins to dip,
below the earth
little islands of
light and shadow.

ii.

the light softens,
carries us towards
the sentry keeper
of the blue earth
the night’s noble
gaze.

iii.

rose-wood and indigo,
immense cloud
washed-out like
faded denim,
stars in summer’s hollowy skies.

iv.

as dark as a tinted window
the land breaks free
from the sun, dissolves
into shadows bent
into a thousand shapes
and altitudes
like softening rivers
of the mind.

v.

uncovered, the night
forgets it flowers and its
prisms, relents to magical
seas of black ink.

reflectively i
      opened &
closed
                regularly,
i was
petals blushed
        in the
height of
summer & a
           frostbitten
bud
in the throes of
winter, except this
                year
   the sky not
grey brought
a heat everyone
              could feel 
except me,
i waited
for an
          opening that
didn't come,
                  a flower
refusing to yield
to sun,
                limbs
staying firmly
crossed, lost in a
place where
             nothing
warm survives
for long.

Like wild oats
the lonesome poets
grow in the ditches
alongside back roads
and when it rains
they drink too much
like the low cotton
in dry fields forgotten
by dirt poor farmers
whose wives run off
with the first stranger
who wipes his shoes
on the porch before
selling her a pretty pair
of green lace underwear
like a bird sick of its tree
dreaming of new leaves.