think for (with) your heart and body. because the mind can be a very terrible thing to haste, a very necessary thing to replace.

what happened is always more important than what you think happened.

trust.

The countries within him become himself. How he behaves when he's in one country is different from another. He knows the spirit of the land and talks to it in its language. He stays until he knows how this country is different from the others, until he understands why others live here instead of only visiting. And right then he leaves. He does not give the country a formal goodbye. He does not tell it why he needs to go. He uses the night the country has given him and slips into it and out to leave. He does not know how to tell it he is afraid to belong. That in all a man's searching for home he is afraid to find one because it means he will have a place where he meets himself, where all of him collects and settles, where all of him stares back and tells him where he has been. 

yesterday i danced a jig that swung my hips low and then the thought of you slipped under me. it swayed inside where i'm softest. the thought of you, allowing you, makes places in me bend that do not want to, that have not bent in years. thank you.

you do not even have to go around the world at least once to know it. close your eyes.  the spirit of tanzania will visit you, will whiff across the breath in your air and carry the currents of china and nepal in it to you. stay close to yourself and the center of the world will come to you. every spirit will find you.

there is a spirit for each of the 7 continents.

there are locations where the spirits of this world dwell. you have access to them. one of them is yours. find your home.

be a disciple of your own voice.

sometimes your business is what keeps you from doing your work.

the first step of 'doing your work' is to know when you're not. is to know when all of your busi-ness has kept you from working.

you can't know whether the baby will be okay until it is born.

you cannot know whether the child will be okay until it has matured.

you do not know whether the mature will live long until they die.

you do not know if death is a beginning until you die.

you cannot know if knowing is certainty until you let it go.

I stand next to her cutting the potatoes into a pile of little sandy brown moons with the skin still on. She, my mother, washes the collard greens as we prepare dinner. Just a few minutes before I am hit and screamed at: "You disgust me at how to stupid you can be sometimes. Stupid ass!!" And now, a low rumble, a hum vibrates on my lips, "Oooh/oooh/oooh." I slice the potatoes slower, having the knife settle into the rhythm of the beginning of my song. "I found out what I been missing/ Always on the runn/uuunn." My mother, two feet next to me, begins turning her eyes from the window sill in our kitchen, from facing the aloe vera plant she takes thick leaves from to place on our scars and burns, to looking at my lips. "I've been looking for someone/uhhhh/Now you give good love to me baaaaaby!" I get into the first chorus of Whitney Houston's song and the tremble I began singing with leaves me. It is like "Good Love" is running up my leg and into my belly, through my fingers and into these little brown moon potatoes. Whitney Houston and Good Love has found me. "Be quiet!" My mother barks. But it is too late, "Good Love" is running through me. I go quiet on the outside but inside the song is still playing and I learn when you sing inside no one can stop the song from playing. No matter whether they are asking you to slice up potatoes or saying that you are "A stupid ass," if you keep the song inside of you it will play over and over. Thickening you with your own self. So when the only place or person you've known "good" or "love" from is you or Whitney Houston, you can keep the good love you've found a secret. Sometimes you need to keep the good love you give yourself a secret so you can feel good love at anytime.

what if it's hard for black americans to work hard because we started out working hard for others?

protect the corner of your universe wherever you find it. in a hot bath. in the hole in the wall restaurant on 5th and forester ave. in the 10 minute walk from the subway station to your door. in the bike ride down that steep hill on bedford ave for 1/2 a mile before traffic bottle necks. in that conversation with her-im over chamomile tea with two shots of rum. in that which you know that you know. protect that which you know that you know in your deepest knowing, in the place that does not know that it knows because this is the anti-thesis of knowing, this is what blocks the universe than letting it become the size of a corner you can sit inside of. find it whenever you need to. sometimes you protect what you know by not knowing that you know It.

i will be a mother in 6 months. for 31 years i have not been a child. i have not been a woman either. i have not been a good daughter. i have not forgiven. i have not made it easy. i have not cried on my mother's shoulder. i have not said i need you, but once, and it felt good, and i did not say it again and again even though it felt good. it felt hole-filling. i hope my child does what feels good.


make it feel good again and again.

mom your whisper hurts. it is not something i want to even put a period to, to stop it is to pierce my own self again

only you know when It is speaking within you. when you are no longer other gods, but your own. you, the spine with all feeling carried in it without martyrdom or unattainable graciousness but with simply I Am Here. without holy waters or candles burning or conjure women gathered in circles in the middle of the forest--with simply the hum from all those places, the whisper inside all of them collected in the breath coming from my spine. when your whisper is the only thing you hear, fuming through every layer of skin on your skin, through every layer of skin on your thought, grazing hairs on those skins that will stand, every part of you will stand and it will be the only standing you do that is not forced. that does not break the feeling in the arch of your spine because it is aligned. because it is god.

i'm not nice. i'm good. good is better than nice any. day. in the park, good would kick nice's ass because nice would steal another little girl's dollie, call this little girl friendly, out of her book bag when she was not looking. complement her on her purple velvet shoes. and smile in her face when the dollie is finally in its pocket. good would give nice some good lickings and send its ass home with its double-handed self to tell it's mother what it had done before good arrives with the truer version of the story. no. i'm not nice.

maybe when we all breathe each of us is able to breathe a little better where it's hard to in our lives. maybe your breath is my own.

the purple lilac me can slow down and fold herself into angles, showing corners and creases of herself when wind blows.

when i'm in need i curl up like things that hide from the sun.

trying to find my new born's skin that needed touch, that asked for it, that gravitated to your skin, that only spoke with laughter or tears, that could not hold itself until it was held long enough by you. when she says 'i'm ok' it is not a lie. 

once i was in phase two, a dream, with visions of tomorrow blurring my today. i had distractions that came by the dozens. like schools of fishes, i saw i creative writing students, the hairs on my vagina, pieces of tomorrow, again, a distant now, heart palpitations, second guessing and you in today. i saw the gums of candles that appeared like tiny glue caves above a fire burning on the leg of my tub, i saw you and you again. you never have a face—you come with a ball of warm wind built slowly into a jack and the beanstalk size fist and in it are auras—nice ones like blue jasmine and hibiscus they are spirits with smells that breathe on me then through me and when they enter they inhale the navy blue me. the me who i say i am that’s saturated in 'someone else can do it better' and 'i will not forgive.' and it exhales a purple lilac me who slows down and can see in the mirror when there isn't one around. who forgives herself first. a warm wind that cleanses, approaching to ask can it sit inside of me. but it only speaks by humming. and it comes as close as across the street. its voice reverberating over to my corner of the sidewalk as i wait to be told i can go.  

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