“You started forest fires beneath my skin.”

The distance between us is long but my love covers all grounds.

I build my own walls yet I am not strong enough to tear them down.

I’m coming home but this time with softer edges.

I may not have been able to keep my heart, but I’ve kept my strength.

I wonder how many scars I would see if I cut you open to reveal all your truths.

It’s comforting to know that I can still make a home in the places we used to occupy.

Everything I want is in your hands. And yet you have nothing to give.

The battle between emotion and logic is most brutal.

Come sleep in my heart. Make a home of it there.

Before I met you, I had a lion within me.

Emotions are such complex concepts to understand.

The light found me in the palm of your hand.

I’m dancing on the edge of throwing it all away.

Your smile is a delicacy.

No one told me how hard it was going to be to find myself.

The tip of my tongue is a tireless sword that I defend your name with.

She lost herself, a little, in that darkness but returned with stars beneath her skin.

When I wear the national team shirt, its sole contact with my skin makes it stand on an end.

To hurt is simply an act of remembering. Of holding my skin to the edge in the hope I might feel anything at all.

You touch me as though you have forgotten my skin.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

My skin will continue to carry your memories, even if my mind wants to forget.

I found wholeness between my skin and his.

One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.