I.
She had big hair
lookin like a tree
in ten thousand leaves,
and it shook
like five thousand souls
a million years old,
dancing in the eye of a storm.
She grabbed a hold of that hair
and sniffed—
a batch of wheat in her hands,
hungry, greedy,
bluer than ballads
that wrap round your heart
in a neon-nailed fist
and shake you up, shake you—
a snow globe in your chest.
She picked through pomp—
lint n stars like seeds in cotton
all up in her cosmic fro,
—curlin into kinks,
wrapped round a ball
of fire they call the sun.
And that’s what she became,
a valley
heady with hyacinth and lavender
off the coast of France,
tipped in tiny flowers,
nipples purpled and plumed.
And when the wind whirled
—periwinkle petals in circles
about her that blossomed
into prayers and burst
through the heart-shaped box
of her hallowed cage—
it lit her up (split her up),
leaving God-prints in its wake.
It littered an ancient path
away from this place
to where the zen gardens grow,
a solitary space
where she can sit with Buddha
to study the Tao
until she knows how
to breathe fire again.
Lapiz La Zuly 