Call Out My Name- The Weeknd

Hey y’all, I hope everyone as well as I am. I’m so friggin excited n ready for my book to come out. I really worked hard on this project and the hardest part believe it or not was giving myself permission to do what I wanted. Until you start doing something you want to do your way, you don’t realize how much you’ve internalized how you think something should be. For me it was partially based on comparison to others’ projects and also me not really being able to picture and define what it is I wanted to say. But I did figure it out and do some intense searching to know what my message is, picture the impact, and land the blows you know? So I’m proud of that; proud of myself, and proud of the journey this book, that essentially is my first child, has gone through. And I’m excited to share my baby with y’all 💕 she’s titled The Growing Place and she’ll be here very soon.

Moving on, I wrote two short pieces between this week and last week. I’ve been thinking about intimacy and trying to unlearn the fears I have related to intimacy with guys based on my past. Part of being able to be a good partner is being able to be vulnerable, transparent, and able to come alongside someone else’s vulnerability if that makes sense. Because in every respect I’ve been too vulnerable at the wrong times with less than deserving people and I’ve been guarded with people who deserve my truth. And in the case of men, it’s ass backwards because men are ass backwards 😂. If you’re guarded they don’t try hard enough and if you’re vulnerable they are children in the deep end. I suppose there’s a happy middle ground but it’s hard to find when you’re constantly reacting to their changes instead of being steadfast in who you are. I went to the Cantab this week and participated in a workshop led by poet Tatianna MR Johnson and she was phenomenal. It was about healing through poetry and working through your trauma. I believe I still have a lot of work to do when it comes to recognizing what was hurtful and traumatic in terms of my relationships and undoing those things. It’s very easy to say why things ended and try to sum it up as things not working out, or people choosing to go in different directions, but it’s hard to understand the parts that truly taught me to fear and be so distrusting of male partners. (Men are trash in a systematic patriarchal sense, but outside of that I should be able to have positive and affirming relationships with men). So I’m undoing that by trying to have those conversations in my poetry with myself and those ghosts.

Petrichor-An Intimate Imagined Conversation

Why are you scared to be wanted? Because I’m afraid of the day I won’t be /He pauses a moment, and looks at me like he’s seen a kid drop their ice cream. He sees the stains on my shoes and he knows he’s never been in them. The size would be hard to get used to.

I can’t express how much I want to be wanted without showing how much I’ve been rejected. These four walls bounce all of the reflections and holes in my armor into his eyes, and he squints like the sun on the metal things in his kitchen. My ghosts make this apartment smaller, my questions make love in our bed heavier. He understands my heart has learned nomadic tendencies to survive, to never be told to leave the same place twice.

I can’t imagine anyone not wanting you, he says as his hands find mine across this vulnerable sea. Imagination never tells us the full story. He only sees me now as he wants me, and maybe he can see the future on my lips, the hesitation in my skin, maybe together we can learn to want the changes that are inevitable. And I can learn to want the ones that decide to want me. Even if they’re lying.

The Untitled poem from the Workshop

His words were filled with helium.

His touch never grounded me in one place.

These places I’ve come to fear the most

stain the holiest of men.

They call to me like his demon did.

They knew my name as if they had thought it themselves.

I always meet them first, while making sure mine have pretty enough faces to not be so haunting.

I wanted to know the difference between my body and the asphalt.

but he never told me.
He never knew himself, but held these things above me.
making a noose of my body

he jumps and every time I caught him—he felt alive.
while I was slippery restrictions

I slipped into places I couldn’t see what he saw in the first place.

thanks y’all