Poetry by Laurence Fuller - Art by Tai Shan Schierenberg
Here’s what you think you know about me, like I comply to that heavy weighted barb you rip across my flesh with delight. Here I am in front of you, I look with sullen eyes you see me proud, touched by the hands of those elect gentry. I speak, you hear commands & in my knowing phrases of the passages in deafening defeat rinse, repeat those bears of dark minds aren’t we all blind? I’ve heard them talk before & wear unencumbered better beating drums than before, before I lift heavy weighted lines, size them up, bluff the guts, cut through the cherry trees of fallen window beams, streams under rays of daylight, shock waves in the night thunder the life I left behind, I adore you, but reservation chokes, sherry coats the old man’s snifter glass.
I give you the best of me & you see in my face picking up glass fragments in the fight to reflect the compensations, social graces correct. There’s that little piece of satisfaction you crave, dripping into contents. This savage liquid will open up your conversations let out all the preconceptions you built up.
The back of who I am when I dream looks past all I see for the real fight rages under covers in the night. Between the real man I am and all those who see around round broken dreams of the people they wish they were.
Rebel warriors walk these urban dreams. But this world is made of many midget men staring down at their penis thinking. They live in fear, run from themselves and believe all else are controlled by that same devil. I watch that devil dance in you & step back to watch it burn up that inferno destroying the communion of shelter that you know could have been for you.
There’s another face to me I tell that in all the grace I am to be, surprises I locked in buried treasures of my soul, though their old that wisdom keep the fires from the door. I am much braver than before and I know you can’t beat the best even when I’m lying naked on the floor. That other face is true in quietest moments washed up on the shores of ferocious storms, he’s more bloodied than you know, neither will he ever loose those chords from anchor.