FIRST BORN (POEM)

I grew up with you all

Many moons later and you came along

And somehow life became this urgency to fit in

Family somehow, and yet my color is a different font

All these years, trying to laugh at your jokes

and yet mine are never that funny to you

Lately, it no longer bothers me though

For my table is set for someone else

And that's okay

I will serve yours gracefully

Even if I'm never offered a sit

Maybe our tales were always meant to be shared and never survived together

Your calls will always be answered

For my birth happened just so I could see yours

For my skin to bear the signs of time

Just so yours won't wither

I love you to a degree you will never get

Just so you could love yourselves

Conceived to pay a tax

Of my arrival in this world

My table will always have those extra sits

You're welcome when you realize

I never sat at yours.

When that gun fires to announce the start of our race

Don't mistake the head start i give you

For winning isn't the endgame

But running with my eyes fixed at your backs

Is my God given trophy.

UBB

CROSS WORDS (POEM)

I expressed myself

And all you saw were my lips moving

Never the words that came out

I hugged you

I held your hand

And all that remains now is the space

That none of us want to cross over

I hold no grudge

Just that my truth was never meant for a human soul

I'm back where I began

On a piece of paper writing

For that is when my words are naked and bare

My world is awake now

Taking in that I'm different now

But still who I used to be

For who I'm inside can come out now

With no fear that I will give myself secondhand clothes

That my mind is lit

With the realization that my arm will always stretch out

For that invisible someone

For I can't help but see them

I never asked for it

For that aching need for inclusivity

That my steps will always halt midway...

For that plead

Who I'm now hurts you

And who you're now is but a distant land

Poetry is how loud I'm and can be

For my verbality is my silence

My whole life was a loud voice

And that is how you only want to hear me

And so this finality was inevitable

Back to my cross words now

as their complexity is my comfort

UBB

My Significant Other - Poem

In this era, you say you have a boyfriend and it sums up the entire relationship

But that name is everything that falls short of what I am hoping

I want to know when he is not okay even when I hear his laugh across the room

To be the first I call when my world rises or fall

To love everything about him, even those I hated in others

For when he calls my name, I melt

Cringe I know! but its better that than the typical

I want a man who knows I’m the toughest woman he is ever met

Who will understands "yes, I am fine” as I am not fine

Who knows that when I am lifting heavy objects is when I want my arms to hurt and not my heart

To know that unsaid I love you is the loudest I have ever been

That I am what life made me and what I made out of my life

That I am my truest self in my head, and when I look at him every fiber of imagination does not even compare.

That in all eras of history, no name comes to mind to what I am looking for

So I gave no name to it, only yearned for it

To kiss that person and know we were born for each other

Our galaxies beautiful on their own and universal when we held hands.

How do I describe that what I mean has no words

Yet the it must exist

For I am the half of it

It’s not what will leads to something

Or what ends in death

It is what shall remain when none of us are no more

That one look at me and he will know that we don’t need to understand it,

But only live it

That what time and space can’t grasp

Our spirits will engulf and our souls will become.

BY UBB