The skitPoetry is the applemy uncle eatsafter every classhe teaches.                                                                                            He goes home to his woman                                                                                            who breeds like the fish.                                                                                            In brass, the ocean is all salt,                                                                                            no blue. Get a sea job here,                                                                                            you die from unemployment.My uncle breeds like the fish.His music, like the universe, hasits own end where there is no end.Even when it stops on the stereophonicsound system, it starts from thebeginning of water.All through the five decades of the song,I was penitential for some future I didn’t commit.My hands felt like faults on Vera Alina’s waist;the girl next door I happened upon in thedancehall.Stars fell, glistened on the floor. Bodies orbital,red skin, green skin, white skin, black seemeda forbidden color. We were dancing the rainbow,the beauty dizzied me more, the bottled starsbecame too much light I barely saw the godwho has forsaken me.The moon came down that night, the whole galactic house.A lady I had known for a chorister in a local churchwhere I was once a contralto, touched my shoulderswhere wings had grown so big.I feared I would become an angel when they fluttered.One love broken in the human heart,sooner than later finds its piece in a flock.My ex-girl’s presence was the sun, a volatile Omni.But I was grateful to my cross; the grace of our Lord, Jesus.Heartbreaks are not fragments that walk alone.They are apoptoses with love for the lonely places.The empty houses peopled by poets I knew as exceptional loversof a world that practiced what they cannot love.It found love guilty when Sylvia overdosed on America.It made love a small island when Tiara Phils rowed her own boat,crossed three rivers to drown her beauty in the Atlantic Ocean.Did she look good in love? or who does?I thought I would hear her call me by my elegiac namewhen I walked out of my empty days through the crescendosto the guitars’ summit; a place for flight.Just when I thought I had no feathers, music gave me wings.Love could be dangerous. But I had the heart of a dancer,elastic, supple with the color yellow.A woman difficult to love is not difficult to dance with.Give space. Watch her spin in the hands of a favorite friend.She is sexual but not openable. Hold her close, closer than a skin.Give her breath. Breathe into her bodies. Make her a bird.Light as cotton. Give your arms, your nests.You are the home where she comes to roost after flight.Do not stop the music which is now her body,even though the dance is over.That night, music became flesh. I was its bone, moving the wordsfrom blood to spirit, the planets surrounded me.She wore me well, this broken heart could still dream & be dreamt of.Elsewhere, as I have heard, women make those who wear them well immortal.Vera Phils became that immortality, perhaps for the night.I went home with all my shadows trailing, as I do not do every other night,mended.Bedding dreams, I switched on the radio as a tributeto a night that became dark the moment the station turned off my soulto the words in marble, spoken on the walls of the room my uncle once      slept in as a boydreamy in the same heirloom I became more sexier than he ever was:For whom would you breed for, my dear younger uncles? for a countryor for a dead economy?In the way I fell to sleep, hands raised as if in surrender,it was visible & bright to know I might have chosen country,the way I labored drowsily to stop the music.