To learn that you are inconsequential is rite, 

     one of passage and leaving.

Passage through that old criss-cross bridge,
going west,
out to places humans have long discovered,
     all kinds of people after which you take. 

For all we take, for all we are, I love to twist curls into ringlets,
sweet oils on damaged hair, wondering and wandering for him. 

Him. He who ties up my intestines like sausage links,
     segmenting, compartmentalizing
     like those white men do.

To know whiteness is to know being

     and lack of such. 

Lack of quietness which percentages and tropics
cannot hold,
a being greater than its body. 

Copy poems by fellow southeastern howlers,
people from whom art takes,
     who may never know silence.

To live disquiet is to know and feel that border, 

     man-made, man kept, between tourism
     and window shopping
     and a sense of belonging.

Twister game of perceptions and choices,
shock of culture,
shock of a soul tanner than you thought,
     more ambiguous,
     more worth questioning,
     more worth separating,
     more boxes to check.

To leave home 

     is for the word to no longer hold true meaning.

The rules, laws, and lay
of the flat, red dirt (red blood) land
     apply nowhere,
     mean nothing to 

outsiders.
Those who have never been forced
to go outdoors for fresh air,
to hold hope, and something else, in our land,
so fertile yet, so bleak. 

We are a defensive, strong, heartbroken few,
for nutrients and fields tilled with life have left us 

     jaded,
     sweet,
     hot-blooded,
     soft limbed.

Village-dwellers, churchgoers, left-behinds.