Someone Is Telling a Story That Looks Like Us

Someone is telling a story that looks like us
This is where heartbreaks get you
A limping leg of a heart, breathed in exhaled falling leaves
Empty apartments, stagnant rivers, violent streets
Those nights you spend reminding yourself you’re worthy a bud
But you look at the mirror and envy the blind
Those nights you look at the stars
And measure the distance where god lives
And you know it’s all a myth
He’s but a legend of lies
It’s those days you’re stranded in your own mind
Walking in the streets of scrambled words
Stepping on the sand un-belonging to that place

It’s when you remember you’ve never been worth a salt to your father
It’s when you remember the bad breath that came with John
Stepping away from his valentines of words
It’s all that cry after you gave John your other cheek
to prove your worth and got slapped a forever ache
It’s when you feel your own beat too heavy to pound on your chest
It’s when your neighbor’s son wants you to be the place he dumps
the girl that left him standing at the hall of the theatre a day
that looks like last month

Somebody is telling a story that looks like us
A time the neighborhood told you I had no rights
To inhibit the parts of your chest
It’s when you folded a fist and a huge man lost two teeth
It’s when I cried and you packed yourself into pieces
Just so that a smile could set in my dimpled face
It’s when I left and you told everybody you were better off
Only for you to fall in your own cushions of hopelessness
Trying to empty the places you knew I couldn’t exist

This story looks like the strength you tried to practice alone
And your Mama said some things cannot be remolded or relearned
It’s when I carried brevity in my own shaky hands only to find
You in a lost revolutionary describing yourself in heartbreaks
Heartbreaks all coiled around in my name

It’s when the first letter of a familiar alphabet say jump into a cliff
And I’m less human to stare in my own heart and catch you on the edge
Only to find answers were never in the trucks we rode at night
Or any other star written in our love story

This story looks a bit like us, but it’s not us
For not all stories end with a princess marrying her prince

———-

We Are the Poem

There’s a nervous big boy with a small hope running
There’s an unappreciated and impatient girl raising her hand
This is a poem about us, of what we could become if
You made snow that I warmed
Or I rained and you poured me out
This is a poem about us, of what we could become if
I removed myself from this sensation
And ran away into chance
You’d choose not to be defeated or drawn
Frustrated or shaken
For you’d find a feeling of pride
In another that show interest
For you hate to stay awake in numbness

This is the feeling of a poem about us
When my dreams get really bizarre
And you can’t sit with this feeling
You and I in the same room
For you live for the truth
And I live to prove
You give me a minute and I say nothing in it

This is a feeling about us
I think I’m everything too much
You jump in some roof
Then it’s your religion against my religion
I lock you in a corner and vanish in another
I’m in a high way and there’s a flame
You ride through mists and get burnt
You think you’ve had too much of us

This is a poem about our end
I am crumbling in a slit
You’re a wondering heartbeat in a forest
All roads lead to a sour smoke
I could be daydreaming but for a moment
Give me a reason to stay awake in the stars of my heart
Creep in this torrent and somehow reach out
To my opinion and I’ll learn to love your religion
For when I’m alone with all my negative voices
I’m beyond myself in thoughts of you
In your own you hear my voice, break into two,
Now there are pieces of me and pieces of you

———-

Here, the Heart of a Scorned Woman

I have these discomforting feelings that make me want to compensate for all the harm you’ve downed into my heart,
I want to make-up for all the tears, all the layers of salt my eyes have grown to know
I want to address and undress the sky off the sun, cover myself with his heat so that I’ll make you forget how to smile
I want to smash your heart, leave you defenseless, take you through a wisdom of suffocation mission, dance you to a tune where you’ll mutely scream till the world splinters

One, two, three, four, these are the seconds I’m counting to the moment where
I’ll Hate you like a fantasy, get highly obsessed with you like a newly invented ambition or a newly born god
And embitter your soul to a dot you’ll be a brute beast
I’ll wear my pride like a necklace and divarish virtue like godly piercings or spiritual tattoos
I’ll cloth myself with violence and wear medals of sins that will proudly hang in my heart,
I’ll let spite possess my tongue, push you with infuriated words, rinse myself off tints of innocence and skin myself with angered and bitter black blood from my ancestors graves

I’ll roam in the dark, steal her veil and climb to the sky, cling to the moon and bleed him off his light,
I’ll lure all the ghosts of the world, gather all the bleeds my heart has ever known and tears I grew to love and form an ocean of pain,
Then drill myself off the wine and happy moments we shared, bath in the antagonized ocean of my suffering, reminding myself of each and every moment you forgot me and I forgot how to breath, to smile and live-
I’ll reminisce on the silence you taught how to speak and the noise you schooled how to obey
Baby I’ll remember it all, I’ll loath life and loot mercy and rape hope – leave your dreams with incurable infections

I’ll drink faith off his elements and leave him stranded in the streets of forgotten
Then I’ll season all that with my anger and hatred, stab my mind with pity and resurrect flashing arrows  and any other weapon of war
I’ll forbid my soul from being comforted by Christian love or Mohammed compassion or mused by angelic souls or any other secured romance
I’ll equate myself with worry and let my spirit balance from growing faint to steaming in heat
I’ll muse my anger, pain and hate a millionth time and commission love and compassion away from pinching my veins till all I’ll know is sin

But Babe I’ll make love, make saccharine love to sin till we’re finally one remembering the hungry child of my past
And her thirsty brother who was stoned trying to steal her some bananas from the shamba,
And mind me, I’ll never regret frying all those memoirs of pain in the steel pan of my heart, heating it up till my blood temperature ignites an angry sun’s heat in me
I’ll give you the assignment you have always craved for- my heart, licensed with all the bleeds, all the games, the breaches you copyrighted with your soulless mind,
Baby, here, here is the heart of a scorned woman, you can have it all, for free.

———-
Poems © Naipanoi Lepapa
Image: Pixabay.com