Terrance Hayes

"I can't hold onto-- very long,
forgive me pretty baby, I always take the long way home." -Norah Jones

I adore how Terrance Hayes' writes. Adrian Blevins says I'm in a zone of conflict, straddling between lyric poetry and spoken word --- so true. But the last few poems:





----

Fulfilling

The strawberry cocoa puff parfait is you.
Remember the flapper dresses draped over movie stars
hauntingly thin
yet beautiful?
And their lips caress over the comforting colored cigar
so lungs can be filled when only the pretty curtain hangs over
the vulnerable lonely
because the vulnerable pretty – is too lovely to sob?

I am not strong like the stoic ladies with red lips and sultry voices.
When I inhale it,
I cough you out
instead hold you in.
They ossify their nostalgia into rungs of beauty and wisdom
and I
sob it out singing my nostalgia blues –

to feel my lungs fresh but green—
and I can’t sense where my kidneys are because I
haven’t had enough drinks to have hell hit.
I am too innocent.

So the strawberries taste like your lips.
And the chocolate, sweet like the stubble of your beard.
And the vanilla yogurt is your energy
vesseling through me
like blood.

For I would be dead if I were deprived of the lonesome platelets that run through my fingers
or allow my tongue the bitter embrace
and my throat the brute strength to swallow a sorrow it can’t purge.

-----

You and I,
Ho Chi Minh,
In Nineteen
Sixty-Nine

Babe, we made it to morning in Viet Nam again.
I know because the deranged boy is running naked through the dirt road again
and the cacophony syllables of his mother’s worried yells has awakened me.

It’s morning, darling.
Senior senors leave the huts of the young senoritas they don’t know—
their cologne washed off of their wrinkly selves – freshly bathed with rain water—
leaving no odor from the night that turned banal fear to mortal euphoria.

Stretch out your muscles, darling, for sunrise.
And your green-brown eyes must greet it. Your torso must say good-bye
to the side of my head and become vulnerable as it separates
from my hair as your fur.

See the bright reds and yellows, darling? The republic’s still calling
to pull brown skin from brown skin. Your eyes so calm, but please—you must stop your soft tender snoring and turn them to mellow yawns.
I will make tea and ready your suit and
we will hug and hug and
hold.

For darling, Viet Nam keeps calling.

I will kiss your lips a thousand times when you get back.
We will lay in our dome.
The deranged boy will run worriless through the streets.
I’ll let you scavenge my body and we can play accordion.
We will roll our eyes at perverted men.
We will lay for days and days in bed—feigning for each other and
all will be good and calm and well again.

But my darling, the morning is calling, and the gun shots are firing,

And I know these days will extend to more days and days.
But I promise to stay strong through eons of
sunsets.
I’ll pray for our brothers and I’ll pray for the haze
of the bullets to cease – but not one in you.
And I will be here when you come back exhausted
needing my therapy to wash away the blood and the blues.
But right now, my reluctant heart wakes you up
for Viet Nam