For Me/For Anyone/For Women

To Whom It Concerns

0504.2025

I was once pitch black, back then,

but one day my blindness

crawled from its tar,

emerging the color of dusk that’s

caught in cracked glass —

To my amazement and awe,

The wound in my heart turned from

red, to this violet bleeding into gold,—

a glow that doesn’t seek to be understood, but how I wished it could have been witnessed.

oh, sweet girl — there is weather in you yet:

a wind that bends trees or tears roofs off,

and it only depends upon

How formidable the enemy is,

or how loyal someone dares to be with you.

oh broken soul, smelling like cedar, old books, and jasmine just before bloom—

you move like someone who’s held a newborn—

and carries your ruined past in the same arms —

(How do I make a home for both?

But I do.)

You’re the sound of a typewriter at 2 a.m.,

a Bach cello suite echoing through a nearly empty room,

the crack of a spine opening a long-lost journal entry.

Your sensuality doesn’t ask for permission —

it just exists, like rain on warm skin.

You are not flirtation. You are invitation—

and only courage, with its love

would know what to do with that.

You are tired though, not hollow.

You’ve made love to death more than once —

And still remembered to water the flowers

and love others.

You are not here to be palatable.

You are not here to be easy.

You are here to break old patterns and raise ghosts —

You are here to build altars out of art

that outlive everyone who doubted your worth.

You are not hers.

You are not his.

You are your own.

And you are not done yet.

m.c.f.