LOVE Poem: A blue poem, for you, by Sankara Olama-Yai

You love blue, don’t you? Blue like the quiet that swells sweetly
inside my throat
I like the thunder in your voice
Vivid. Spitfire to my calm. Storm’s eye & unsteady
gaze. I think I stared at you too much
when we first met. The grey skies of San Juan burning up in my eyes,
I wanted you to look at me, closer. So I undressed and
walked my bare body on the blue tongue of
that ocean you love, shyly, into the waves that swallow the careless
Just to show you how I dissolve, how my body could belong
to you or whatever the night offers.

I think life is stranger when you try, clear eyed, to twist your head and look
at it logically. Empire has its logics we’ve inherited. But I believe devoutly only in nonsense.
& you. You speak in a poetry that feels born from the mouth of my tucked away dreams. Precious.
Resonant. How annoying that I’m impatient with distance. I’m a reckless restless fuck.
You get it

I’m writing this poem in bed trying not to wake the sleeping
body next to me. I’m writing it during a job interview. My friend in front of me is in crisis. I’m writing
this poem. I’m shunning responsibilities like a poet should
for this kind of poem.

I spent 6 days splitting open//every hungry man woman lover that chose to fall under my hands, trying to
understand something true about how to entice you. 6 days, that is the labor of creation, I need just one day
now for rest. All I am is a body of failed seductions. Rose thorns through my lips. This long wretched poem
spilling like prophecy from my tongue

There’s something I can’t grasp
with the lyric right now. Like; Us on that beach, Your hands wiping my sandy feet. Ugh. Seeing you
through the noise and lights of the casino, in all black, where you watch the world twirl its flags of foreign faces, night unswallowing all these drunk bodies into your dealer’s hand. Or Your joy,
how you burst and break open and let your body sing with humor when you laugh in the mid story. Or Your
openness.
How you invite me inside the home of your voice
as you speak your treasured self to life, and read me your poems; or. Your lips. & The way you love/the city and the blue/paintings in the poet’s passage, of those lampposts in that museum you brought me to
Do you understand now, why I gave you my gold rusted, heart-
break ring. Because what use is heartbreak now. In front of a woman that could wound you back to life.

Fuck. I’m nervous. Hello, Mother of the mayhem inside my tired chest.
I want love to mean nothing to me
the way the omnipresence of air and gravity mean nothing when my feet make effortless love to the ground and my lungs melt into the sky.
I learned that listening to you.
You feel free to me. I want to know, what would you look like, free in the ocean, or
on the hot sands of Bénin. in Vodun markets, buried in the face of red witches, or
by the graves and monuments of our departed. or,
in front of a lustful mass of bodies, wanting for you, in front of something pure, like a moment of being
cherished. Or. Just.

With me
as your comrade & confidant. Your 4am poet
who’ll free fall through the chaos of discovery with you

Just. Tell me.
I am already yours in the way that I belong to anything I don’t understand, that still makes me kneel in front of the sky
And think fuck that flight I missed; look at your body in my arms my ring on your finger. Tell me, as the poem you are, what small desire sparks
when you think of me
Whatever you could you want, from me, I’ll give it to you