Beyond Your Boundaries

Back lots and avenues etched on the insides of your eyelids

could tell me where you’re going. 

But you don’t even know.

You haven’t closed your eyes  since that time you followed 

a calico street cat into an alley  and it hissed and scratched 

your soft hands until you lost the confidence to cartograph. 

So you stare at stucco ceilings in hopes that plotting the dots will help you fall asleep and create maps again. 

Do you know why I smoke cigarettes?  Because they smell like my mother’s hands;  the smoke paints a picture of her holding me  when the only thing I could taste was salt  through pain

Do you know why I drink coffee?  Because it feels like my grandmother’s smile so soft, bright and early at the beginning of the day—so proud— after no sleep and  a lifetime of little failures Do you know why I run so much? 

If you want to live the American dream—

Great.  Cool.  Let’s do it.  But know that it doesn’t come without a fight. 

Here we are.  You.  Me.  The American dream. 

Jack Johnson walked into a sweater party  and I couldn’t tell

if I fell in love with you then  or somewhere in between dreams You cooked banana pancakes  and played me to sleep  You built a white picket fence before me then left before I could turn my left cheek.  If you’re reading this,

Like the best kind of cheese you can think on burnt-up wheat,

At your #29 Strafford apartment I stepped out to go alone

to the coffee shop,  the crisp Oakland air  filling my lungs with hope. 

The streetsides are walled up with fruit crates  and a man looks at me to say  You have an easy smile

and I wanted to tell him it was because of you but you’re the kind of guy who builds walls of fruit,  and expects flies not to swarm. 

So I tell the man thank you,  and step back into the apartment with two coffees

Did you help me make this bed?  It feels different from the last time.  You made all the other beds as if to say thank you for love, warmth, and every freckle felt in-between. But today I awoke and the bed was already made the morning, like my coffee—bittersweet.  You laid the sheets without a sound and left.  I could not touch you enough to tell me why...

Hold my hand Like that time we played in space

I mean “pizza place” a neighborhood paradise

The same smiling faces have worked for seven years,  laughing over little discrepancies until the tap runs out

It drips with dreams; ambitions to leave but comfort in the ordinary weighs heavily. To you, here is home. 

And everyone will be back to laugh tomorrow.

Words can be a lot like weeds You maybe don’t notice them at first 

until they grow  and grow  and soon enough

they 

suffocate the  things you 

You are like mini waffles

the perfect size and amount of sweet powdering sugar in me

Tell me how you wrote your dreams.

How you manipulated your movements to balance between the inevitable wake and the choices along the way.

Yet to always sweetly dream.

I dream differently; with the first wavering breaths in a morning. The last ten minutes of shut-eye before the sleep gate opens. But mostly when the world is quiet to me; when it stops yelling—that’s when I dream.

Discourse we strategically place to save ourselves from getting struck by lightning on Christmas

With your back to the wall, hold to it with the palms of your hands.

Let your eyes well. Feel your throat tighten. Look up.

Lose your grip. Slide down the wall until your chest touches your knees

and you are as low as you’ve ever been.