THE DEVIL AND THE INFINITE NIGHT



Sometimes I get so scared that I believe I have been possessed by the devil
So that I scream and holler and try to push him out of me
I wake up in bed and he is standing over me with his yellow eyes
He doesn't know my name but he knows me
Cause he used to possess my sister and I would see him in her
Now she is a nun
I watch youtube videos of exorcisms and in one I banned myself from watching it as soon as I did
The woman crept backwards on the stairs, yelling with her eyes out like pitchforks
The scary thing was that I didn't see her face when she got to the top of the stairs
And only saw the upturned face with the devil's eyes coming down them.
Still I think it is sometimes
But the devil is not murder
If a man murdered me I would be so scared
But it would be a living scared
That I would die and the sun would rise despite of me
When I think of death by the devil I only think of suns
Rising infinitely into space like some nightmare
But a nightmare you can't get out of because it is the night
That is all encompassing
I get all encompassed by the night everyday
People think I am very friendly and innocent
I spend every day inside this house being the creepy thing they couldn’t handle
If they really saw deep into my eyes they couldn't handle me
Once they could see the darkest part of me surrounding them
The blackest part of my eyes in front of them, a sun that never sets






TWO DOORS TO HELL



With each new day of being in love
I felt two doors opening out in front of me
One was a gate to something like hell
Another was the big expanse of green that is Life
I wanted to choose one but I couldn't
I had to write this
Unforgiving world who is so sure my rhetoric is mine
And not theirs
If I am anything I am the flattening of so many into one thing
That I am not powerful
At least not as myself
The gates of hell in front of me feel like an extending staircase of concrete
That fall below me
Into the great expanse which is Life
There is only Jesus waiting in my closet
Like he has been since I was 4 with his red eyes
I am convinced that everything now is going to be ok
Because I am happy now, still lonely
Because my heart is caught in something frivolous
But not so unhappy as before
Deadended into pigskin, a pigskin cave
Where I couldn't breathe
I can plant daffodils now among the heathens
Who are so replete in their belief in antiquity
That I can't help but think that they are the stupidest people on the earth
Although I know that's me
To feel so much for redness
Rushing forth on myself with a bitter sundering
With a soldering of smoking the skins in
And burning them so dark and crying
That they are no skins at all
I am in pain in this world
I have more than two options of good and evil
And this is horrible
To never be home
To be home in horror
And outside in the calm
And empty, among the soldiers
And other people I don't know
Who are so similar to me
Yet we can't speak
We don't speak about the same things
When I am wondering about the brain
They are thinking about art
Art is horrific, empty
It teaches the world to be mediocre
Making is not this
It fills up my house with a many splendid things
When the devil comes in he trips and
Gracefully gets up, but not before
He picks up the pretty thing that tripped him
And holds it in the light
Is this blue water, he asks me
Yes, it is, I tell him
It is blue water
I have to be protected
Because I am so afraid




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these poems appear in Dorothea Lasky's book Black Life (Wave Books)