Tyson West and Susan B.

Susan B.
Collage

Inspiration piece

Mickey Squirel
An elegy for me
By Tyson West
Response

Most tragic love tales arise

At a distance – fixed points chalked on the stage

Glances at the paseo

Among your cousins of varying degrees

Faces veiled – cleavage flashing

Showing up especially to ignore

The flecks of me and my homeys

Cobbers cool as the cut and color

Of our sagging jeans

Rhyming and resonating with John the Revelator

Ain’t no question who we be to ourselves

Hanging back waiting

For the flip of your hair.

But, after I sat upright on your Mamma’s couch

Calling your Daddy “Sir”

Flicking the ashes from my Camel into my cuffs

I was no longer your wanted poster

Nor were you my pinup dream

We became the medium of each other’s expectations.

And the thousand small instants of intimacy

Chopping and blending

Your meats and my spice

Compromised bread broken along fault lines altering

Who we are to be,

Like so many bed bug bites

Insomnia and smells and snores

Spiral around the glades and rills

Across the deep blue of the midnight hour.

Soothing sounds of never silent television you never hear

While each grisly Cop Land murder

Desiccates my private eden

Coming up for air among your choices of fiber and feeling and food to leave me

With one wing, in a soft body disarmed in patterns and colors I never chose

We move towards being beings no longer what we thought were you and me.

While you buffet our created space

With complaints of your transformation

I secret my iridescent blue

Unforgiven magpie feathers

To treasure a trace of me

Among your black and white.

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