by Tenaya Nasser-Frederick
1.
Humans are social creatures
and I would feel kingly by you.
Not just breathing but star-studded,
approved in the registry, at the top,
since I wrote myself in there, to walk
in the moon’s velvet court
of black banana walls
and animal hinds.
But what the unattainable does is deny you your own riches.
And the twilight screams bananas
while I rest all day in red furs with no fruit.
It-cannot-be-otherwises call me to bed
it must be this ways pry the eyes open.
While I could have taken from it, even just the pleasure of
her rhythm juxtaposed by mine, for an hour, to get on that stage and play for a minute,
but a raucous minute, as a grooving unknown
I could build a house off that floor’s dust, something to invite you into, our faces
slowly building their expressions into a series of ritualized masks,
until the most important day in everybody’s mankind, where it is no longer
unclear but entirely forgotten which mask is being worn / and the steps we take become
pinpoints, stranger / and the walls / to feel them
and realize, in a very brief span it turned from not enough into too much
over the lip of a metal basin
the banana will take you till the forearms.
2.
When she is gone away there will be nothing to say
rising from the hard nature leaves too delicate,
mirrors of song that join in one point of a song.
She is supple and round when the world is flat
in a love ball fed film running crumpled
and steers point to stars while the pelvis re-roots
the moon, from a state of total vulnerability, is cleft,
and it has two legs uplifted by the ground, tenderly
the body tweaks this mind and pulls a piece to be received
and recounted, the body needs to feel recounted,
frail enough to weep and weep at its own journeys,
and yet, generalized into a smoother trend, the maiden-ship
goes the one time with swelling wood and shatters on the maiden-rocks.
3.
The light cross-pinched in many new patterns, so a girl, red tinged with laughter,
in the sun, yellows trees and sidewalk, adds to blue the blue that is there
and non-plussed, cuts the dance of lights that repeated as if
it were anxious of itself, from another hungry boy’s vision,
who gawks, aware of his affront which is and isn’t pertinent
but true
so true...
The rapist is a germ, caught in yearning’s lip of ledge
As I am a sloth to whom trees cross
and roman brick, to the pacifiable is a fore-mistress,
a skin wrought to foreclose plumpness.
Your thighs are all of your own
and this is totally rediscover-able
takes pain to keep knowing, again
I reel back hours on bait kept by the whole of the bottom.
Nap, Neptune, I commune with dark sets of scales.
It is here, to fight, the way is out
dig safe then, on a line, from the surface.
As she achieves, through chasms of dark, the red smile
sunshine never will leave off