CALL ME BELOVED

Should I listen on mornings like these, when I stumble
over cracks in the sidewalk, to those whispers in my ear
that I’m living in a stolen body, twenty-five and
somehow not yet used to these limbs.

These mornings spent sitting tearing and revising,
contemplating my little orange book, six years empty and
six years of guilt bound-up by it’s leather orange strap –
a gift given by my brother, opened and closed a hundred times
for fear of marring the pristine pages and cracking the spine.
To try to fill it would be like killing my favorite sort of kindness,
insignificant and perfectly thought through, and a shame
if these stolen fingers should touch it,
with this language that I think I’ve stolen, too.

Maybe I’ve borrowed these moments, too –
mornings like these where even the air I breathe
doesn’t feel right in my lungs, or this pain
when I know that I’ve a flock of things to say,
I can feel them all thrashing around like songbirds,
beating their desperate wings against the cage.

The words don’t come, so unspoken they fall
like pretty feathers bludgeoned out and tumbling silent down.