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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