For Sojourner Heart.

I ask God for the mercy of tears

And instead-

I am stabbed

with the incoherence

and ambivalence

of my own neutral eyes.

But you!

I knew you-

Blooming to me

with every swelling wave,

unfolding to me against the current,

despite the wind, upstream,

with some sympathetic depth of loyalty.

Drowning in your own conscience,

I braved the sea with you.

The oceans in your body,

exhausted in incompletion,

deep of memory and failure and death.

I, floating, drenched in sun,

Bathed in the vein of light,

Continually urging you,

Pushing you 
up and through
the arid harshness

of blood’s deserts.

And imperfectly,

we wounded our messy feet

Upon the jagged edges of truth

and the merciless corners of reality.

So I am an atrocity to cognition.

I am poisoned by faithfulness.

I am blinded by reserved judgments, hopes,

And in my outpouring,

chained within my own disaster,

I find that I am

addicted

to the maintenance

of a fangled illusion.

Still, I will your healing in between each passing second,

Longing for the day 

that I am 

your cause and your effect.

Loving you in 

your twisted mind and scarred neck,

through 

your wordplay and knuckles and toolkit.

I dry my eyes from your guilt-water,

to realize

that yet again,

I am at your mercy.