We Shouldn’t be Doing this. (Draft 1)

We Shouldn’t Be Doing This ( A spoken word poem)

There is a frequency to a room when two people decide to cross a line they haven’t named yet.

A vibration,

a checking of locks,

a shedding of skins,

a heavy-lidded warning that the body is moving faster than the heart can keep up.

It is nine p.m. on a Tuesday,

his home is a harvest of wood and orange tones, a water plant sits on the dinner table reaching for the light like a Proverbs 31 reaches for her priest.

He reaches for the gloves.

Latex snaps against his wrist—

and I feel the silence lean in. I am heavy and anxious, we shouldn’t be doing this.

Tonight,

I am anchored between his knees on the floor, I am a prayer in his sanctuary of earthy ease.

There’s no chase, no conquest, no clumsy demand for entry.

And Maybe

I am just a poet romanticizing the mundane until it glows,

but there is a liturgy in the way he handles my hair.

Painting my crown like it’s the only scripture he needs to read.

He tends

to the raw mechanics of the version I conceal:

the unkempt,

the uncombed

the unwashed.

While the world demands the "after",

the glow,

the polished reveal,

He sits with me in the “during”.

We shouldn’t be doing this.

I tell him I don’t want to stain his porcelain, that this dye is a

beautiful,

messy

crime that lingers.

He offers me a cup of chamomile tea

a bucket of warm water

and a stool.

In the bathroom,

the pigment bleeds out into the drain,

he doesn’t flinch at the red on his palms,

he rinses out the doubt,

section by section,

a quiet ritual unbound to demand.

We shouldn’t be doing this.

This. In your living room. Reading poetry until the knots in my hair blur into neat plats.

Sitting here. Stretched. Vulnerable. On your couch.

Tongues stained with wine and metric verse.

It is three am on a Wednesday— the next day!

How time flies when you’re lost in a strangers’ eyes.

How time flies when the flesh and the the heart move at the same pace,

Not one after the other, but hand in hand.

The man is in the kitchen before the feast,

I can only hope he is hungry for me.

Not in the same way he is hungry for a meal.

I am not a plate waiting to be devoured, not a treasure to be conquered,

but a map to be understood.

We shouldn’t be doing this.

Watering the parched gardens of our souls. Undemanding and Simply tending.

We shouldn’t be doing this, but I am glad that we are.

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Author’s Note:

I’m still processing this. I wrote this after a kind friend offered to dye my hair.

I think there’s something deeply intimate about sharing in the mundane. Folding clothes. Cooking. Rearranging your living room. Painting your kitchen. Re-potting the plants on your balcony. Plaiting your Bantu knots before bed.

We look for romance in gestures of grandeur. And I hope we all find it there.

I also hope that we remember to see it in the not-so-big things. In the everyday things. In the preparation of the land. In the planting of the seeds. In the watering of the trees, and the harvest of the fruits.