to all that lie awake
Dedicated to the artists, the excavators.
To all that lie awake
In between qualifiers of day becoming qualifiers of night
Clutching chest tight to various instruments of innovation
Of varying textures of black
Running backwards from forward-thinking erasure
Permeating spineless fable-made gaps in historiless us
With fruit and more fruit than the archive can home
Injecting dusk speckled shells of unknown
With morning and more morning still
Like bovine pinnacle prod gilded with our non-binary past
Jabbing beams of prodigal childhood into our hive body
Once destitute from generations of barren ancestors
Shoehorned onto scraggly beaches
Ironed out of their matted terrains and knotty lineages to blonds of sand
This old genal of time like a fork with only two teeth
An entrance into slavery and exist into death
Both land mines of the same lie
But truthfully behind each brick lies a map guiding us backwards to now
A memory book portal into real
Populated with ballads of nuance and trumpet horns of technicoloured existences
Of pablo franque, of samuel morgan smith, of ira aldridge and centuries more
Once all my heroes were newborn in their passing
And i’d never seen myself so clear in the face of a stranger
A stranger older than the death i’d known
In victorian black & white
In woollen tunic and blue violet silks
On stages spinning amethyst worlds
Softer cottons of lavender for sleep
That we might dream of longer inheritances.
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