The details I can only write
From the glow in your brown eyes
That still circles around an arriving shadow
To match even the slightest
Touch of your grey coat

I always want to write you a poem. Perhaps too perfect of a poem before you came. To show you the momentous event of our reuniting. In case you didn’t already see, how often I want to write our stories as beautiful up like our stars. And it wouldn’t have to be perfect I know, you’d love it anyway like the way you love me.

So I begin with the wrinkles that form by your eyes when I’ve made you happy. There’s no coincidence I wrote about it in a freestyle. And how happy you make me when you let me rest on my laurels and never call me out for where I feel I fall short.

To you I am the sky, changing with beauty and you missed me when I left. Your world changed I could tell but I didn’t feel the same. I felt wrong, but I wanted you to see me smile. For many nights I dreamed of unfaithful regrets. How it killed me to live my fears because I trust you and I look to you in our love. And it’s great cause you’re good at steering and I thank you for that—how you’re never phased as a whole by my days.

When I’m hammering away at our foundation blindly and you patiently hope for the brighter days like the me you know when I’m loving. Like the me that wrote this kind of poem. And I will continue to give this me because you let me give you all of me.

On my end, you were part of my story before you were mine and perhaps my love for you is like my art pieces I make for you, they’re mine and I wanna hold you like I know that true love exists. That even if words didn’t exist this this would still be as air, ungraspable but there.

I want to see you, as I have, in so many parts of your life down the line. I don’t know where that may be but I hope to help you make your dreams come true. And as I say it part of me wants to say sorry for the times I can’t say I feel those words but I wanna eliminate that, and add more joy than a women could ever imagine giving another human.

How when I think “he’ll be an old man one day”, I get chocked up because I wanna see you in your next life rise up closer to the higher heavens, and I don’t care if I am a passerby with a good deed in your next life, just that here I wanna touch your soul. I want my words not to just paint our flesh that hold us but the parts we can’t even comprehend to glow. And we, we get the chance to experience this. Here, now we can hold each other at night. And think to ourselves… how beautiful that two people in this big universe can feel something so much greater than ourselves.

Walis Tambo

What a privilege to dream.

I return home with only gratitude,

With one thought to the next painting

The other on Tillich’s ‘Faith’.

They return home to ask:

Where the rest have gone,

And what they’ll eat for dinner.

To them I return,

With a painting to capture their dignity

The way I hold two cultures in my heart.

Taste of Novelty

The moon is a slither in the black sky

I find myself living beneath

You ask me that evening:

Where we’d go after this

—If for a moment

the words sang like a breeze.

I say any place that makes this life,

more of a mirage.

So I’ll stay here for a little while longer,

Where the entrance is a revolving door

And circumstances are red flags used for parades on days

We find our selves celebrating,

Our paths crossing

But never lingering on the details of a petal

Still, a secret garden

Of histories I’d forbidden

Like a child who’d never seen

unclothed bodies, but fruits left bitten

Just to taste what freedom

Were like to live in, and in new skin

I hold open the doors to let a new Self in

Yet I glaze over your features

That make me feel like summer tales

Spoken privately to strangers in the future

were the best parts, and were ones that would make me burst to tell

—So I never do

And hold my breath like a succulent holds water

For a taste of novelty through all my senses

Promising myself to self-contain in a bell jar

For the both us to admire

A time a Golden hour could be persevered in a reflection

Projecting not only what it was,

but what it could have been

To stay beautiful ideals

and remain fantasies