she loves black guys

The text message compared me to another. She asked do you still eat pork? She was sifting my blackness through a channel against his blackness and screamed Black Lives Matter cause she didn’t want to mutter the common place slurs under her breath anymore. I won’t compare, just observe and I can tell you more about coming back into myself than about my own blackness. We went to the same schools but my skin wasn’t currency in those days. We were teenagers and you never visited my home, my jeans don’t count.

My hands have grown too large for my phone and my pictures reveal the age of my inside not the fire of ambition. I won’t compare or satisfy with reasons.. There are books left to read, notes to be rung. Strange how the isolation has borne this ringing.

I fall asleep to the idea of this one woman and wake with a love and want so intense .. they vanish in the moments I’m not present. I haven’t changed position but the chance slid away.. and I slide away.

I can’t save you. The man that would say he could is left out there, stuck in the growing marsh of false promises.. still I want to save you.. and the truth is I can’t. You are trapped in the gathered keys of my aggressive keystroke. I can’t. You are needing something without a face and I have a face. And a heart. And bones and a will. I can’t offer you a heartless skin so you might scream Black Lives…