After we dap,
he covered the calluses in my hands
with the soft fat of his own palms.
We find the footing to dance,
as we snicker at the stare of a cuckhold saint.

This moment, in memoriam to the play of boys
striking matches in the dark and
sharing tales of kingdom come.

Reminds me of the whiskey my grandaddy used for libation.
Pouring slow for his boys who played in the sun on winter’s eve.
Told tales of how they balanced themselves on ship wreckage
decaying inside the corridors of burnt-out mortuaries.
How they searched for PaPa’s missing pillowcase
and clicked their tongues
while swinging the oars of sunken rescue boats in roofless Cadillacs.

Told us how they harmonized to the ghost songs of the preacher’s daughter,
chewing snuff,
skipping barefoot down past those abandoned Mississippi bus depots
and into the wilderness to pray suspended in holy fire.

And become one —as ash— by morning.

My man laughs, his chin on my neck.
And he asks me, “What’s good, bro? You good?”

He’s close enough to daddy to be a liar,
yes I know.
But he’s far enough from God
so I trust him with my secrets.

MEA CULPA! ALLOW ME CONFESSION!
I BORE MY SWORD AGAINST AN UNHOLY WOMAN!

The bend in her knees were a fever dream,
reforged by the fire which shapes my folk’s haunted bedding patterns.
Echoes of my mother hollering away my daddy’s Saturday nights,
in the dancing silhouette of fists and burnt potpourri,
which she performed at the dinner table in
the dark.
I was afraid of her.
Of the jump in her gospel.
The noise in her sex.
I was afraid she’d kill me.
That she’d cool the boiling in my belly.
That I’d lose the pleasure of a shotgun reaching from the upper room.
That she’d poison the turns of shame.
I hid from her.
Picked at her lips, after her evening commute.
I was her arachnid in dry, white clay.
I am my father’s son after all.
So she bid me farewell.

I cower from my deeds
and in those thin black arms he covers me,
begins to wash me,
while from his songbook, he hollers:

Peel off the mask and touch the color of fluidity.
Peel off the mask and find absolution in vanity.
See now, the lines between lines that
reveal new shapes.
Androgenous eyes.
Peel off the mask and…

…if we take the eons brother,
we’ll have dined, tasting the arc of new symbols to end this poem.
Much as stars never truly collide.
They only color the space between
and remember the possibility.