I Am Nobody’s Nigger

  Not trying to make up for my absence

  From the rest of your year

  I don’t want to write words that cut like paper

  Sting but barely bleed

  I don’t want to write my needs

  Just yours and mine combined

  I don’t want to write poems about you

  I want to write a dedication to you

  In my first published poetry collection

  I want to write you promises in permanent marker

  To feel real human shame if I forsake these words

  I will make these words come true through you

  Not by ink but with lips and tongue

  Fingertips and hips

  Buttocks and biceps

  Feet and talcum-powdered toes

  Eager earlobes

  Praying palms

  Forearms and forehead

  One hand gripping your hair

  The other stroking your chin

  Hot breath on every inch of skin

  I don’t want to write poems

  I want to write fascinating contradictions

  Not flash fiction to fulfil a literary addiction

  Chasing lines into sleepless nights

  Eyelids shut to reveal tattoos of you within

  I don’t want to write, ‘Forgive him’

  Or scrawl an invitation into sin

  I don’t want to build biro bridges between you and I

  I don’t want to write us walking off into the sunset

  Don’t want to blot the sunrise from your eyes

  Younger teacher

  Student no longer

  I don’t want to force revision

  Of anything you would rather forget

  I want to intuit what you don’t share

  And sense your mystery

  I don’t want to rewrite our history

  Or reclaim your story as my own

  I don’t want to write just because I feel so alone

  I don’t want to write poems about who we were

  Never were

  Could’ve been

  If I’d just seen the signs

  If I’d just been in the right place at the right time

  To receive all you were trying to give

  I don’t want to write poems like that

  But this is how I live.

  Published 2013 by The Westbourne Press

  1

  © Dean Atta 2013

  ISBN 978-1-908906-16-8

  eISBN 978-1-908906-17-5

  Dean Atta has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD

  The Westbourne Press

  26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RH

  www.westbournepress.co.uk