It Was My Second Day Vacationing in Vegas, and I Was Home

The lady who claims to own the concrete
to the off-white apartment building
is throwing soul eaters
and verbal iodine
at the man reaching upwards
to God
because he blew smoke
towards her side of the white line in the road.

and I’m taking my time
watching this interaction,
because you can’t scream Mary
in a Vegas hotel room where
the walls are narrowing in on you
and the living background
who are all carrying full cups of sparkling
“wish me luck and maybe tomorrow.”

The Concrete Queen
tells the Smoke King
the many ways she can ash him out
in a much more poetic flow
compared to the fellow stranger
from the day before
who let his dog make a claim
to her stake in the game
we are all just trying to play.

And I understand her
more than the twenty dollars
I spent on borrowed harmony
that helps remind me that I’m home
anywhere something is at stake,
and that I’m a visitor when Home
doesn’t have the reach to scratch my back
and the proximity to tell me to sit down
and learn the translation of peace
I was never taught to read
in whatever castle I had the audacity
to think was mine.

The Secret Ingredient is More Midnight

I learned that you can still smell pain that isn’t yours in a kitchen over salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, butter, and Slap Ya Mama on a medium-rare New York strip. I learned that you can still envision the home of all your homes being occupied with the love only Black families feel in their first names and white people watch Kenya Barris shows to understand while feeling the world shift slightly to the left to you and yours, but only to you and yours. It’s still going to be Tuesday for all the other of God’s children.

And that’s the silence that doesn’t speak until it rings in your ear with little regard to your equilibrium. We find the strength in our bones our ancestors handed down to us to carry one day to the next while still finding enough tomorrow in us to keep our eyebrows pointing forward and our knees as fluid as the runner who refuses to be caught slacking by the neighbor behind us.

I still get caught off balance by the occasional sight of my ghost’s zombie in my spare bedroom, but I’ve strengthened my core to withstand the winds that come with its presence. I worked out the humanity we don’t talk about in church and watched on as my son’s dimples become reminiscent of a smile I used to own so proudly.

I was eating steak when I learned you could smell pain and that my grandma was the strongest person alive, which meant that if I had her DNA, I could handle the weight to find balance when the world decides to claim your Tuesday and gift it to your neighbors. She taught me how to balance the blues with the hues that rub your shoulders and remind you that midnight is only a minute long, and five in the morning in Oklahoma on a Wednesday is God showing you the result of your balance.

Mr. Monday Morning

My Monday morning
speaks cousin to smirk
because everything that was breathing
during the moon’s supervision
in my home is present
and annoyed by my proclamation
of me being alive at 5am.

I fix my face.

It’s Monday morning.
The rain continues to announce itself
on my patio and my cats
are fighting for my attention. Thankful
and alive-
A mixtape made for furry beggars
and a man that is learning
how to become resistant
to spiritual pneumonia
and the go-fuck-myself shade of blue
I’ve been trying not to paint
with my spiritual crayons.

I fix my face.

It’s Monday morning
and the rain has made its point
and walks gently away from the stage
we are all slipping on
while leaving the scent of wet grass on the curtains
that swing stretched-out arms to the performer
that knows how to Denzel through any
“it’s all good”
a man with shoulders my size is supposed to recite
in the rendition of “Dreams and Nightmares.”

I fix my face.

It’s Monday morning
and the rain barely remembers
my existence.
I have become a watcher
and a historian already. The future me
is trying to remember
the sound gravity makes
while attempting to lift up a bag of memories
to plant in a cumulus cloud
of his science’s making.
He says amen only to himself
when he’s done.

I fix my face.

It’s Monday morning
and the day is humming
my entrance song
while the sun eats everything
that has tried to touch
what I unreluctantly love
and quietly thank the mud for.

There’s a shadow everywhere
that’s breathing in my backyard,
and I continue to fix my face.