There is an episode of BBC America that my husband can watch (and has) repeatedly. The main character is a baby iguana that manages to escape dozens of hungry snakes within minutes of birth. (It's a rather fast-paced chase scene that may have you jumping up from the couch urging on the fleet footed fellow, getting one's adrenaline pumping as much as your favorite action film.)

Can you imagine within moments of taking your first breath, having the wherewithal to run for your life, to know instinctively that being still is a good first thought (if I remember correcrly, the snakes cannot see, but they sense motion), but running is the absolute and necessary follow up to the failure of stillness? Running fast and far and prefarably high up the side of a nearby hill?

They are wired that way.

Nature's wiring is mind-blowing.

Every living thing on the planet is wired. Or programmed. And although some species are more complex than others, the whole of it, from the single cell amoeba to human beings and everything in between, above and below, is intricate, interconnected and mostly still a mystery to us.

Ever wonder if stars have DNA?

We listen to Harmony Hall in the car

& I sing louder with I don’t wanna live like this,

but I don’t wanna die. There are no good words

for suicide. Sun pearls my arm, loose

on the car window. It’s spring & I won’t

romanticize dying, though I do want a way to say

I want to die without making anyone cry.

As I unroll the window I hold my fingers through the running

air & let March mother me, brush my body

tenderly. I didn’t mean to write a love poem

but the love keeps happening, despite

all my attempts to leave. No one notices

when I sing louder; the moment passes anonymously.

It’s okay. I look for language to name me.

so I married the institution. The institution wouldn’t sleep in bed with me, would only fuck me in the wrong way. When I ate ham & eggs I ate alone. When I brought the institution its favorite black coffee, the institution would set it on the side table & mumble a slight that’s nice, thank you. In glimpses of joy I would remind the institution of its wedding dress & the institution would say it actually hated all that lace, the white washed out its opaque face. After dinners the institution let me scrub all the dishes & before sleeps I brushed its hair. I missed what the institution & I once shared. I remembered playing marriage on swingsets & dreaming of the institution. I remembered kissing the institution in my beat-up car under spreads of stars & the institution loving me back. I tried to pinpoint when that love went bad. It was the moment I told the institution I’d give it all I had & it was all I’d ever want. It was the moment I thought I was enough.

i up hold the paradox that is love

against all calculable odds.

i run the numbers through my machine:

we shouldn’t be good.

we shouldn’t be holy.

and despite this, tenderness.

and despite this, light.

and despite.

i overview and look over.

i analyze and edit.

we shouldn’t be wondrous,

and yet.

and yet.

in the room flooded with yellow light

you were on fire.

we could not have predicted this.

hair falling on a shoulder.

we could not have computed this answer.

when we ran all the systems

we did not think about this.

how your body is a sun in the darkness.

and all the stars were shapes beneath your eyes.

according to all known odds,

we are ruinous.

cosmically hopeless.

and yet. and despite. and regardless.

in the field beneath the sky

you saw everything.

you should end back at the center where you started.

all things should return neatly to their place.

i want you to be tender with what remains.

the absence of love leaves no fossils.

your hunger will not return to the earth.

to decay, first understand

the feeling of palm against flesh.

first have something to leave behind.

something you want them to know about.

i am on my knees in the dirt.

i am burying my tenderness - i keep a little

for myself, my friends, the earth.

the shovel sings hard and cold.

i understood rot by understanding growth.

i am sure someone will be here some day.

at the axis of the end.

where love and death intersect

if indeed they ever cease to do so.

to have my hand, you must have one of your own.

get dressed next to me in the mirror.

i understood complexity by knowing simplicity.

how every color makes up the next.

i am not sure you will be here tomorrow.

tonight the air is fragile and the sky bold.

we exist as a handful of everything.

exhale onto your palm and spread me across the world.

despite myself, i want to see it all.

i want to walk into the darkness

and bring back souvenirs for your nightstand.

you should end back at the center where you started.

with your body three-dimensional.

existing in the plane of existence.

and the sky will be bottle-green tonight.

and the hands we will hold, only now alive.

sinew beneath flesh above bone.

I love you so much that I killed a living being and presented you with it's corpse.

It's a beautiful little bloody thing that you'd appreciate

of course, I thought of you when I committed murder

there's no better way to express my fervor toward you.

This plant-based passion delights all your senses

bright red pedals, so delicately scented,

wrapped around a thorny stem and set inside my hand,

and when I look into your eyes you know that everything expires.

Everything except the love that I feel for you,

which extends its existence by feeding off the death of lower things,

including other interests I may have, and both our bodies.

the sound of your voice crawls against my throat [it's a tickle, a mockery, a mimic i cannot make / i crave, i'm addicted to the words that tumble from your mouth / i rather hear you again every day than feel the brush of your lips.] from the taste of my fantasies, my tongue has shriveled from the melancholy it leaves behind [i recommend to those who have never felt so unclose, don't recall the good times, since it reminds you that you can't go back to the past.] my soul associates, people with poetics: i remember people as lines, i press the seams of melodies so to see the shapes of their bodies [and that pitch she sings, the chorus of her tragedy / it's the chord i know your name by, it's a tune that i ache to share with you.] soon they whisper to me, though their comments slip past me entirely, the idealism of moving on [fictional concept if you ask me, there's always one song you hear once a decade yet still quote the entire thing effortlessly; you're that song to me]. my only wonders lay, in the safety you've become to me [does leaning far too much make you imagery or hate me?]

Exalted in shame,

the authority of not knowing rises up as a collective voice in tune

with some aspect of creation that we cannot look upon and so their

eyes and minds are kept downcast with self-imposed limitations

kept safe from things that keep us from growing

behavior, born out of fear of not knowing

born out of having no fear

born out of needing humility

to teach us how to treat one another.

In line, candles lit, marching heads all bowed down,

and ironic white robes flow around the feet of those

who laugh, work and toil, spend time, live, and play

and look to the sky for the same answers

that their ancestors suffered and prayed for

that nations of people had died for

that wrought out of savagery, something far higher

which stretched throughout time in its prophetic vision

and died years ago, although is still with us

indelibly stained on the human mind,

that ancient idea:

we don't really die.

Before I am woman , I am black

Before I am woman , I am black

Before I create the metaphor and perform poetry , you will hear how I am black that is how I am Treated like black , talk like nigga

But I am not your nigger

So I will not white wash my verbs and adjectives to not offend

I talk like dead came crawling out my skin

I Part the Red Sea and show you the bones of my people buried in my vernacular

I talk like twine stuck in my teeth , from all the times my people bite down on the whip … and let blood swim down their backs into haystacks and straw

I am not built for dead white man poetry

I speak like Porsha olaywiola , jasmine mans , Cynthia valentine , rudy Francisco

But if you listen carefully , I sing hymns like maya angelou , I took the pain , tell it the way I talk

Make a choir , believe in a god , ask him where is his mercy , where does justice go when it not served ?

Their is no way , he needs that many black angels ,

If he is not building army , to correct history

Or does he know we are walking statistics and picks us off the concrete … so their is somewhere safe for us to lay our head

I was told I speak with so much anger , I don’t vist anger … but I walk with grief … and heart full of passion

So when I beat on my chest when I spit on the mic , crack open my wrist and show you were I can feel the rattle of chains , ready to slip around these colored hands. I speak , while I still got time to tell our stories .. before they erase our history …

I want to teach my history … before I become a haunting , a concrete angel …

I was told , by someone they write to escape the world .. ( it must be nice … to out run your imagination , like milk drunk nightmares, that can put you too sleep … when the midnight shivers .. ) I dance with the reaper … he knows my footsteps… can be a “misunderstanding” in the dark night … with a neighborhood watch that thinks he some kind of spider man .. I think it’s funny , how that pen of yours allows you to escape …

I think how I can’t outrun my shadows and my skin color … both are black …

This world is afraid of both …. So how can I pretend to do both , dream and honor nightmares … that are known to become reality’s

My poetry be black , my poetry talk back , this poet is black .. ..

…

if two stars collided, would it mean the end of my world?

or would it just mean that two living things -

two fiery passionate breathing things -

touched each other again, without me?

i am asking to be a part of the equation.

the x or y or z. cross me out. relegate me.

but for a moment i would like to be important.

a pawn. a variable. etched in with pencil hands.

whomever. saint or sinner. add or subtract me.

more or less. sunlight, moonlight. do the old dance.

where we love, or don’t love. but the thought is there,

a variable, a butterfly flitting in and out,

saying catch me, catch me, catch me.

and i’m getting the update. it might be the end.

if i were held, i mean. like a pencil in a tender fist.

like i am a theory that’s yet to be all sorted out

but it’s rumbling in their head like a good song.

i had a dream where it didn’t end this way.

where there was more darkness and rain

humming in our bodies. i’m still dreaming,

in that soft violence, in colors that stain,

but i’m starting to see. that there’s a rhythm

to all of this. that there’s a tide

and i’m on my way to shore.

that i can’t stop moving or i’ll miss it,

the bus stop, the taxi cab, the train station

that takes me up up up to love.