Ain’t nobody writing love poems whilst women are dying.
How you gon’ fit romance into a coffin,
be turning the kisses of a killer into honey.
We’ve got a hive in our stomachs
and our locust swarm hearts
feast on the butterflies.
My lover says,
she’s practicing faith
sleeping next to me.
What’s the difference between prayer
and a lover
when both are a war-zone?
Us, men,
call ourselves altars
but turn deity to sacrifice.
Aren’t we tired
of the blood beneath our fingernails,
facing a choir of killers
in our reflection,
sing bloody over
the graves in our garden,
turn love stories into horror.
We’re bogeymen afraid of ourselves.
I’m scared
of raising a daughter
who asks me to check
beneath her bed for monsters
And I pull out her father,
howling, with the moon dripping
from my lips,
or raising a son
who carries our curse,
can’t say his own name
three times in a mirror.
Us, with “I love yous”
bleeding from our jaws
that taste like knuckles
if we chew long enough,
and a silence caught in our throats
like accessory to murder.
Ain’t nobody writing love poems
when we’re so busy with obituaries.
Dear men,
there’s a plague in our veins
that haunts our hearts,
the way we love, we breathe
another dead woman from our lungs
and how you gon’ speak to god with that mouth?
Come to prayer in a church where another woman dies
in our presence, again,
and still, we do nothing, again.
It’s time, we pull ourselves apart
and build a temple from our hearts
that doesn’t have murderer etched into our blood.
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