Saul Williams - She

i presented my feminine side with flowers she cut the stems and placed them gently down my throat and these tu lips might soon eclipse your brightest hopes she had nothing but time on her hands: silver rings, turquoise stones and purple nails i rubbed my thumb across her palm: a featherbed where slept a psalm yea, though i walki used to flyand now we dance i watched my toenails blacken and walked a deadened trance until she woke me with the knife edge of her glance i have the scars to prove the clock strikes with her hands i have seen the truth many times but for the first time she saw me i wore suspenders for the judgment in my pants i laced my shoes with sorrow and walked a weary road dead end streets dont come undone with double knots wing tipped shoes that walk on air through vacant lots she kept her deck beneath her pillow and had promised me a reading she stuck a bookmark in my heart and walked away it was autumn then the leaves suddenly flames the sidewalk burning cinders i walked the streets as if the sun had called me boy mad at the world on aging feet shuffling her cards shuffling my feet head to the sky blue the clouds her cards the clouds: her cards shuffling the skies a storm passes new clouds appear: the chariot the priestess the moon in broad daylight: an omen love is an unbridled horse with one wing out-stretched the other tucked and folded on the right side the horse galloping towards a cliff knowingly panting just enough for you to think hes laughing he?love is male? love is a dumb horse with silver streaks and a sometimes penis a sometimes penis? on thursdays the rest of the week she grazes and paints her hooves with red mud making tracks through the fields which disappear soon after they appear because nature has a way of changing the same way it remains she kept wild horses in her stables and rode bareback in search of stability i looked on and watched like an orphaned child with dreams of riding this merry go round there are trap doors in my pockets where lie my parents and my admission ticket i cannot admit to my orphaned state and hope to get a horse with a saddle i am orphaned in her mind and she will accept no admission her merriness goes round an elliptical orbit moods gallop toward her mechanical death am i the suited gentleman in the carriage the lazy eyed blacksmith or the orphaned onlooker who cannot afford admission and dreams of that blue horse striding the desolate sands to the ocean of his fears? he fears abandonment and will name his children after the return of the sun he thought it was a distant yellow ferris wheel that was the first time he stood without admission his legs, scrawny tenements ashen and bare his eyes: broken windows sealed with plastic manmade and taped to the back door of death: his face he had one dream she asked that i remove my dreams before entering her home one cannot enter a courtroom bearing arms i had decided to sharpen the edges of a certain childhood fantasy and tuck it away in my sock emotional lavishness can deplete memory banks although her parents saved and saved she knew no baptism which is no fault unless you have a Christian name i do not trust her my plan was to attack in the 43 seconds that it takes eyes to adjust to moonlight after lights out no one told me that dreams glow in the dark i was discovered and scheduled to be lynched in her town square i remind you for every one of us you lynch there is another burning witch i once visited a lost world where black men with broken necks held the hands of charred women they shared a love that was as beautiful as it was incestuous calamity makes cousins of us all and she doesnt want to press charges my yellow cousin ghost of a gypsy drunk off the wine of pressed grapes repressed screams of sun shriveled raisins and their dreams interrupted by a manhood deferred will she ever sober? or will they keep handing her glasses overflowing with the burden of knowing i never knew never knew it would haunt me the ghost of a little girl in the desolate mansion of my manhood i am a man now and then i remember that i have been charged one million volts of change will the ghost of that little girl ever meet my little girl? shes one now she must have been three then maybe four shes eighteen now im twenty-five now i must have been twelve then my mother said he was in his thirties and shes not pressing charges although shes been indicted and i cant blame her i cant calm her i want to calm her i want to call him names but only mine seems to fit come on lets see if it fits two little boys with a magic marker marked her and it wont come out they put it in me no we didnt what are you talking about its not permanent it will come out when you wash it damn, maybe it was permanent i cant forget and i hope she doesnt remember maybe magic marked her lord, i hope he dont pull no dead rabbits outta that hat what she gonna do then? and what was Marys story? story of a little girl with a brother and a couch shes got a brother and a couch a sister locked in a bedroom and a mother on vacation lord, dont let her fall asleep her brothers got keys to her dreams he keeps them on a chain that now cuffs his wrists together mummy doesnt believe he did it but hes left footprints on the insides of his sisters eyelids and theyve learned to walk without him and haunt her daily prayers and if you rub your fingers ever so softly on her inner thigh shell stop you having branded your fingertips with the footprints of her brother the disbelief of her mother and her sister who called her a slut for sleeping lord, ive known sleeping women women whove slept for lives at a time on sunny afternoons and purple evenings women who sleep sound and live silently some dreams never to be heard of again ive known sleeping women and have learned to tiptoe into their aroma and caress myself theyve taught me how to sleep having swallowed the moon sleep till mid afternoon and yearn for the silence of night to sleep sound once again painters of the wind who know to open the windows before closing their eyes finding glory in the palate of their dreams she had no dreams that night the windows had been closed the worlds of her subconscious suffocated and bled rivers of unanticipated shivers and sounds that were not sleep she was sound asleep and he came silently it wasnt the sun in her eyes nor the noise of children en route to school she woke to the rays of an ingrown sun fungused that stung more than it burned a saddened school en route to children who dared to sleep on a couch exposed to their schizophrenic brother only to wake with a new personality one that doesnt trust as much as it used to and wears life jackets to romantic relation ships cant stand the touch of fingertips damn, was that marker permanent? i hope she dont press charges i hope they dont press no more grapes into wine because she might get drunk again and fall asleep Rise and Shine my mother used to say pulling back the clouds of covers that warmed our night but the fleshy shadows of that moonless night stored the venom in its fangs to extinguish the sun rise and shine but how can i when i have crustied cloud configurations pasted to my thighs and snow-covered mountains in my memories they peak into my daily and structure my moments they hide in the corners of my smile and in the shadows of my laughter theyve stuffed my pillows with overexposed reels of ABC after-school specials and the feathers of woodpeckers that have bore hollows into the ring of time that now ring my eyes and have stumped the withered trunk of who i am i must re member my hands have been tied behind the back of another day if only i could have them long enough to dig up my feet which have been planted in the soiled sheets of a harvest that only hate could reap i keep trying to forget but i must re member and gather the scattered continents of a self once whole before they plant flags and boundary my destiny push down the warted mountains that blemish this soiled soul before the valleys of my conscience get the best of me ill need a passport just to simply reach the rest of me a vaccination for a lesser gods bleak history