This is how the city welcomes us
Into its arms of blank pages playing
Minor chords on open elbows.
This city is a scorched vein. Its belly a rough-
Hewn patchwork rumbling at the threaded margins.
And I love you in this city, dear God I love you
In this city that makes romance
Of the hiss bursting from a freshly cracked
Bottle of your favorite beer.
This mashup city, this
Composite scar harmony city, this
Channeled flicker switch of a city
Where every morning Love
Is pulling an extra hour from the shelter of your spine.
The way you pull me across all this concrete
And bottle the world inside a city block.
How the f** we end up here anyways?
One night inside the low tide of your slumber
And I wipe the entire week off my blackboard chest.
The weighted empty of my hands an encryption,
The distance between Manila and Chicago: 8,000 miles
Slowly collapsing inside an Oakland bedroom.
How unlikely this should all be,
How less imposing these number become
Across the wet crook of your neck.
A morning of my grandfather's lost memory of home,
The unrolling parchment of your grandmother's skin--
All this history in the open veil of your body,
This seed, this push, this silt,
How we been built by a blood procession of so many hands
Pulling plough over poverty.
Love is a shifting probability;
But we been living in a sh** economy wondering
What is Love supposed to conquer now?
But I love you in this city,
Dear God I love you in this city
Of boarded windows and missing unemployment checks,
This partitioned city,
This open-air crackhouse city,
This dream-severed city.
If I could still love you through this
Skylight sweltering,
Drumline pavement city of echoing footsteps,
If I could still love you when this city
Is a trembling fistful of last chances
Waving off the last round of eviction notices,
When this city is a groundswell pummeling,
When it is all split and marrow
And gutted promise,
This city, its canva**ed arms mainlining,
Riot gear and sulfur,
This city, its quake, its thundered hum,
Its torch-lit streets
If I could still love you through this, this city
That speaks to its young in the burdened language of kindling,
This city of fight and forward movement,
Of all the places a person can fall in love.
This city that falls so short of loving us
How we love it,
How we still keep tearing at the city's fist for its plum root,
How we still keep shaking the steel trees for fruit.