You’ve made a mess.
So allow me to make it messier
By submerging my hand in your foreign substance
(With no gloves on)
And massaging it into my fingers.
Talal Asad would say that this is horror
“Matter displaced”
But lucky for you
I am horrible:
Taking matters into my own hands.

On this particular night, you saw red
And chances are you’ve seen red the night before,
And before that
on the street
The day before that
on the evening news
When you were young,
You saw it on your mother’s top lip
And your grandfather's knuckles,
You probably saw it on a schoolhouse wall
From a poster labeled “the human body”
Showing you that your insides are
In fact
Red

Therefore,
Red became your favorite color
By force
By Blood
The color of all your Valentines
But this time
You saw red
And spilled your “first chance” at life
So now you plead with me
to concoct a “second.”

You turn to me, in my lab coat
swishing your trauma in a beaker
And adding a “clear” solution to your troubles
from a dropper labeled “Elements”
You tell me everything you think I should hear
and nothing
But I work with it
condense it into a file
LastName? _FirstName.
You see me typing away,
underlining portions of your nightmare
And in exchange,
I am beholden to two things:
you
And the clock

I am beholden to you because
In your worst moments
I take a magnifying glass to your pupil
Measure the diameter of the dark parts
And see myself
The main difference between us is
I’ve learned to close my eyes
Before the crimson hues take over
I know what happens to a dream deferred
It explodes.

So ultimately,
I close my eyes every time
I decided not to see her lip,
Nor my own
Even when I am covered in scarlet’s fever
Inside and out
I decide to feel nothing
You decide to feel everything
Yet just had nowhere to put it
Until it exploded.

I am beholden to the clock because
That’s the game we must play
(Right?)
The one where you show me all your cards
And I take one
And I keep guessing
Until your pockets run out of paper
And my body runs out of energy
But is miraculously adorned in Joules
Cap it.
All is.
Him.

As a result,
Let me tell you a bit about myself
I am your Juris Dr. Jekyll
I am a risk-averse control freak
Who deep deep down
Knows I will never be Grade A meat
But I am A great cook

I will pour and shake your mess
Turn it into something we can all digest
Transform your horror into “your honor.”
I will not defend you,
But defend the law with you in mind
Particularly the you from the night before,
And when you were young

So allow me to change things up a little bit,
And please excuse the mess
I just want to feel something.

Your experiment is my spirituality
Your mess feels like touching wool
of the lost sheep
And putting the last first
This is not the typical pornography
This is velvet.

The erotic type of velvet,
As Audre Lorde would say
That since touching
And making enough people digest
I can no longer expect
anything less of myself