I Want To Be Alive With You [By Toko-Pa Turner]

I want to be guided by older-ups. I want babies to be born where old people die. I want to be sandwiched in the middle of a messy togetherness.

I want to be warned before I do something stupid. I want to be forgiven when I do it anyway. I want wisdom to be tapped out on my eardrums and not Googled. I want transitions to be recognized by fire.

I want gifts to be educed from children. And teenagers and adults and I want to mean something to my community. I want to get drunk on substance morning and night.

I want to hear your dreams. I want to raise a revolution for gentleness. I want to call out the bullshit on consensus reality. I want to get rich so I can billboard the highways with validations.

I don’t want to be another faker. I don’t want to show you my good side and hide my humanity. I don’t want to dole you out my Self in digestible status-chunks. I want to challenge you in long, drawn-out rituals and still find you interested.

I want to feed you seventeen course meals made with spices I crushed. I want to recite you circular poems, each beginning cutting a deeper grasp. I want to make you feel something, even if it’s awkward. I want to sing you songs which are ancient and new.

I want to carve stories in trees with tools my elders fashioned. I want to keep sharpening them. I want to find places we’ve never been. And then, I want to return there, but backwards.

I want to shuffle up words so we don’t sleep through them. I want to learn things and then be splashed into never forgetting. I want to make you feel seen. I want to hold your pounding heart in my gentlest of hands. I want to make your thing feel like my thing.

I don’t want to miss a moment. I want to dig at the bottom and find it false. I want to turn up unknown depths. I want to stand in this hurricane and sing the sweetest, most naked song you can bear.

I want to be alive with you.

Via Rebelle Society

“No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.” 
― Adrienne Rich

waiting freedom

at day's end

what was abandoned

in struggle 

was tucked in stacks of business cards

clutched tightly

I can't remember how

it wasn't lost

a tangled 

badge 

symbolizing: 

love / freedom

flight / light 

this bird: 

purchased with his cash

and worn  

in regalia 

to encourage the rising

broken

as dark minutes terrorized

wolf archetype

attributing details 

to play slow

in foggy denotation

a necklace

worn backwards 

to not show it's color 

like my hope / green

like my strength / yellow

like my pride / black

always dialing back the brilliance

  

motif is surely easily fixed

repair shouldn't be costly

but oh how it costs

So I keep it here

waiting to be ready

for conclusion

will this bird 

set to flight? 

or cast off?

either way 

freedom is waiting