“I always wanted to be more than my brown skin, when you told me I was sweet like cinnamon.”

I loved each and every one of your faces.

Tear me open and rest inside me.

Here I am, a mosaic of becomings.

I am a child of borderlines and we are two lands, carved differently.

For once I want to be something that lasts.

I’m sorry only I can both drown you and be the summer that dries it away.

This foundation can only take the beating of one heart.

When you kissed me you breathed air into my lifeless soul.

I am unbearably human.

The most beautiful parts of your body are those you had to grow again.

Somewhere in these walls we’re still dancing, feeling nostalgic and much too in my head.

Depression is the way my eyes have learnt how to close more than open.

I’ve got nothing left to give but I keep digging deeper.

Read the scars on my body like braille, for I no longer know how to tell a story that belongs deeply to me but is no longer mine.

Living is not living when I am living without you.

Hope lingers like a moon.

But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.

I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It’s my white hair, and I put color there.

So that we don’t go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak.

What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without?

My friends are a crayola box. They highlight different colors of my being, representing different aspects of my personalty, I’ve noticed.

But with writers, there’s nothing wrong with melancholy. It’s an important color in writing.

I don’t judge people by their sexual orientation or the color of their skin, so I find it really hard to identify someone by saying that they’re a gay person or a black person or a Jewish person.

Watching the changing colors [and then] retire to the forest without picking a pawpaw for supper.