Her neck (#poetry)

You

With the neck that's a curve of soft golden marble

That I kissed in innocence
Then paid in blood


You nearly killed me.


You, do you watch me

Like I watch you?

Lady with the curls

Nose Greek in its hard perfection

Lady who steals from shopping markets

Because you think they deserve it

Genius who reprograms lab equipment

To break it

To punish the next shift

Lady, like luck, you are cruel.

And I love you.


Great Expectations

Was it a game?

You must have loved me, you must!

Every picture

Of my future

Centered on you,

And yours.

I loved yours, I love them, my heart aches, I cannot stop, my children, my children, my children!


Rachel weeps

My children are no more my children

They were always yours.


"Miss, you're just like Mommy but nice."

I wasn't trying to steal them.

I was only showing kindness

You were too angry

I wasn't trying to correct you!

Only help!

It wasn't my fault they loved me!

I was just nice

I was just myself.


That's the worst of it

I think you know that

I think you know that you threw ME out

Because YOU had been outcast


By you.


I hate adults.

When I breathe, they die.

One by one.

But now I can't breathe

Without my chest aching

My ribs, so tight

Encage a heart

Around you.


You know they don't love you, right?

I would have died for you.

You, in my dreams

You

With the neck that's a curve of soft marble gold

That I kissed in innocence

And paid

In blood

Sponteneity (#poetry)

You love me.

You made this for me.

I did not make this for you.

This life is your gift to me.

Nothing that I give you is ever a gift

It is only the natural flow of the rivers of life that you give me

It is the overflow

the droplets

The excess of what you gave me

You're ultimately giving it all to yourself

But that's not my place to judge

Not my problem to worry about

This is yours

This is from you

Because you love me.

You are my best friend.

You sat next to me in the Garden of Gethsemane

You hung over me at the cross

You saw me in every torment you went through, not as the evil tormenter you could have seen, but as the beloved you wanted to save.

You dearly dearly dearly love me

You're obsessed with me

You didn't just die for me.

You threw away

You.

Better to Live In a Roofless Home (#poetry)

I’m a Reliant K song, waiting for you to walk out and drive away, just like he did.

You can say you love me, but can’t touch me

He could say he loved me, but wouldn’t stop.

Love is action, you dolts, love is action!

Shut your fucking mouth

And put love

Into mine.

Her fingertips

I lost her fingertips for you.

I won’t leave you after paying so many

Fingertips.

But you will.

One day you’ll weary of my drip, drip, drip

The Proverb about the nagging wife

Drip the glowing eyes, my giggle about nothing at all

Drip the naked belly pressed against yours begging for sex

Drip the head leaned on your shoulder, bright eyes begging for Bible time

Drip the flung out form butt-up on the bed, feet and toes kicking, face flat while mind creates creates CREATES a world begging for your presence, for children I don't make alone!

Beggars can’t be choosers

But you keep making me choose all our dates

And nothing happens if I don’t lead

But I didn’t want to lead!

I want to dance the follow with your bony hips leading mine

I want your love in my mouth.

Beggars can’t be choosers, I’m telling you!

If you’re going to make me beg

You’re going to make yourself hate me

Feed a mouse a laxative

And it will lose its cookies.

Goodbye, future cookie.

I hope I’m a false prophet

But until now 

I’ve never been wrong

Except about you

And your love in my mouth.

Did you want the jungle adventure, with its bugs and heat and slime, or did you just like the idea of her?

When gender equality leads to racism? #comics #blackcomicschat

Hey there. Check out these two pictures one of my new artists just made of Natasha, my thunder-powered superhero:

I love what a good artist he is, but because the first thing I noticed about Natasha 1 was boobs, I asked him to shrink the boobs a little. I wanted to emphasize, I said, that she was a teenager (and besides, she's athletic, I said). I was worried that my male artist was sexualizing my female character. This is supposed to be a space where female readers can see themselves without being "other"'d.

But when I saw Natasha 2, I noticed not only the boobs had changed, but the little ripples of fat on her belly, the thickness of her thighs, the angle of her shoulders...

Which is more sexualized, Natasha 2, or Natasha 1? Did I really "save" Natasha from sexualization, or did I just make her lose a bunch of weight? Which character looks "Blacker", if that is even a thing? Does one of them fit more closely to white superhero paradigms?  

My artist for Natasha is a Black guy who told me Natasha One was "the first thing that popped into my head" as he was reading. I remember sitting in the airport when a Black mother dropped off her teenage girl requesting that the child have a chaperone for the flight, for her safety. "She's not a child," the white airport lady said. "I mean, look at her." The lady said this because said teenage girl had size double D breasts. I think she may have actually mentioned the breasts out loud, which is maybe inappropriate. When she saw the child's ID card stating her age she begrudgingly acquiesced, but it's a fact that Black children are often "un-child-ed" due to their height, strong build, or development of secondary sexual characteristics. A twelve year old boy was shot because he looked old enough to be "thuggish" with his toy gun, after all.

So our unconscious stereotypes defining children and teenagers actually have real-life implications for real-life people. 

In my zeal for gender equality, was I racist?

Some of you will jump down my throat for caring about something so small and unintentional. Okay, let's go there. I know that I'm not "intending" anything here but that doesn't matter. Results matter. I'll go so far as to make the controversial statement that the cops who shot the 12-year-old weren't "intending" racism either--they had a stereotype in their heads of what makes a child, and what makes a Black man, and they acted on it in the heat of the moment. I suspect they weren't evilly plotting to rid the world of Black people. I suspect that unconscious unintentional "innocent" racism KILLS! 

See, for a believer, "I'm not racist, I have Black friends" or "you can't be racist without intent" misses the point: it's not about me, and how I feel, but how my actions affect those I care about, unintended or not. If I'm all about the love of Christ, then I should care about how someone else feels, right? I don't need to justify myself because I've already been forgiven for my sins and justified by Christ--it doesn't matter whether or not I'm "guilty" of racism by some magical societal standard, but whether or not my actions harm my Black brothers and sisters. To put it another way, I don't need to defend myself: what I need is to fix my behavior because I love my people and don't want my actions to make them sad. So if my unconscious attitudes cause pain to my precious sisters, why not change them? Why fight that?

Controversial statement! The works-based theology that plagues our society is the primary reason white people keep arguing about racism instead of stopping to listen. If it's all about me working myself to heaven or Nirvana or whatever, and racism is bad, then by golly I need to defend myself because I'm trying, I'm working, "I'm not racist in my heart!" Don't judge me, please! But if we can't become "good people" on our own; if we need someone else to save us; then once someone saves us, we don't need excuses. We don't need to defend ourselves from "white guilt" because all guilt is gone--what is left is only to change our lives to love those that Christ loves. If those that Christ loves are complaining that our perceptions are hurting them, then we'll stop to listen! Society needs that. We need results not guilt--it's not about my white or mixed or Asian journey out of racism, but about what is happening to my Black family! Love drives action, while guilt drives inaction. Guilt is very me-focused, and despite all the SJW twitter rage it's not fixing anything. The grace of the Messiah Yeshua is the only thing that can permanently eliminate institutional racism.

In this case, I'm going to go with skinny Natasha (because she's also underrepresented in the media, because skinny girls are no less "Black," and because most importantly I'm not going to be an asshole to my artist who redrew this entire picture when I only asked for a breast reduction)--but I need to pay attention to my unconscious choices.

What do you think? Was I right or wrong? Judge me. Talk about your experiences. I'll listen.

English Literature Poetry Study Group! Become Great By Studying the Greats.

Hey y'all! (this is how the people around me talk now) You wanna join me in my little poetry writing group? Or maybe you're just someone who enjoys listening to the soft sound of daily poetry--and you wanna know the classics.

That's me, anyway. I just downloaded this awesome app on android, called "English Poems," where they tried to collect all the most famous poets of English language literature. From the 1700s to modern Harlem. We'll be super educated on poetry by the time we finish! We'll analyze EVERYTHING. And, the best comment each time will get a free book.

Without further ado:

Merc with a mouth...has absolutely nothing to say.

Deadpool (One), while crude, had an effective point that hit my heart just when I needed a comforting tale about disreputable suffering endurance.


"Deadpool 2", if it had a point, shoved that point so far up an asshole of unnecessarily grotesque, unreasonably sacrilegious, and unsexily obscene meaningless overwritten drawn out driveling crap that I couldn't have found that point if the point were magnetic and I had Iron-man's weird unnecessary glowy chest emblem installed in reverse to guide the point TO my heart.


Deadpool wants to die throughout the whole movie, and if I were this movie's doctor, I would HONOR that DNR: do not resuscitate and do not recommend.




Am I sick from the popcorn I stole after scaring away the guy sitting next to me, the fibromyalgia I earned by slowly drowning myself in poisonous cortisol over the years, or because I sat so close to the screen I now smell sewage seeping through my skin?


It took "Maximum Effort" to keep watching what can only mean the writers got high off the contents of my fish tank, watched a load of Japanese porn, and then got hit in the head too hard by that humor technique where someone says something that sounds meaningful and then a drawn out pause contradicts it. Guardians of the Galaxy II did that pause well--even the sharpest katana used too long becomes crutch.


Cut off about 40 minutes of almost-child porn, "this character only exists to be a lesbian," "Deadpool insults God for the umpteenth time", and looooooong repeated boring pauses, and MAYBE we had something. Maybe half a thing. Do you even have a thing in those stuffed pants, Deadpool? Like any work of love you make, you know something's wrong when you find yourself hoping it ends soon.


It wasn't good for me, Wade Wilson.


And box office numbers aside, I have a feeling it wasn't actually GOOD for you either.