Echo and Narcissus

Can I let my words pass through your lips?
The whispers in my head have the exact timbre of your breath.
Will you read my story?
That way I can pretend that it is you all along–
Promising me waves of rose water
That taste like pears
Lingering in my nose-
Turning into memory.

Say the lines I have written
Back to me–

Aloud.

Rise and fall in the places I have drawn.
Quick-quick-pause in the gaps where I return
From the edge of a thought.
Or flow where the letters run on like a pool spilling over the edge meeting the horizon and kissing the sky.
Speak low,
with the depth that I imagine you are taking me,
Of laying in bed at day break as we wipe the sleep from our eyes.

Ah, the fog that forms on your mouth right before you kiss me good morning.
Ah, the puff of last night that stirs as you turn to face me.

Put your hand precisely where I left a gap on my side.
Squeeze your leg through the crevice between my thighs.

Love me-
The way I rehearsed it in my mind since the birth of these thoughts with my coming of age.

You are only a vessel for the love I give myself.

Call Her Name

They said a change was coming
The horde in red pulsated
Like a lava flow of hope:
Ignited.
Viscuous.
Ominous.
It set to fire every object
It came into contact.

It felt like the death that must come
Before a new world is born.

They didn’t mind that the core of this frenzy
Was blood and flesh;
The shattered bones
Of a form of justice
Doled out in drunken conversation-
That isn’t blind
But peers from the corners
Of its soulless eyes.

Ah, the music of anarchy
Was all too sweet.
The romance of a revolution
Was a tantalizing heat
That sucked you in
And shot you into the atmosphere
In an explosion
Of promises and ash.

Do you remember
How you call him “Father”?
How you craved the iron of his fist?
Because you deserved to be punished
You unruly, unworthy,
Unsuspecting son of a bitch.

He lies

Sleeping–
When he should be doing
What you hoped he would do.

And when he wakes,
Like a thief in the night,
Without care for your peaceful slumber,
He foams in the mouth
With a venom
That slowly erodes you from within.

The hope you thought you saw in him
Was not hope he was giving.
It was the hope he stole
The same way he steals from you now.

To set into fire
To burn like the pits of hell
To make deeper and wider his chambers
Until so much magma cannot be held within
He erupts again,
Spewing out evil and destruction,
Leaving behind a trail of death.

The earth shakes
Over and over
And the deafening sound
Of this unholy upheaval is only broken
By the voiceless cries:

The lady Freedom,
And her mother Truth,
Her sister Justice
And the child Peace.

Change did come after all.
But change is a trickster.
It is never what you think it is going to be.

So when next you put your hope on something,
Call out her name:

Liberty.

Let her lead the way.