I want to live in the jungles of your bones,

Explore the facial structure that makes

Those beautiful contours.

I want to slide through your rib cage,

So I can be closest to your heart,

Allow my breath to diffuse 

Into your heart’s vibrations.

I want to have intellectual conversations

With your dopamine

Understand him, love her.

I want to race with the blood in your arteries,

Just to see who’s faster.

I want to stroke your femurs,

Caress every bereft fiber in your bones.

I want to sip from the melanin in your genes,

Taste the beauty the world denies.

Extinguish your loneliness.

Mend your internal wounds.

Kiss the booboos you’ve never told a soul,

The ones that twist your spirit into a diminutive silence

Accenting the hollowness of your bones.

But I will teach your cartilage how to fight:

First bow; next smile; then, fill your body with godly antibiotics,

The type that doesn't damage your immune system but feeds

Your debilitated cells: love.

Self-love, self-acceptance, appreciation.

Together we will teach each other how to purify

Our minds and bodies of society-bred phantoms

We will show our phantoms appreciation

Because without them we wouldn’t have found each other

We will express self-love and self-acceptance to

Show the phantoms exactly what they taught us

And if that doesn’t obliterate them,

We will have a dalliance of freedom & love,

Throw a party of parties,

Scream boisterous ditties of independence.

The same one America threw when it won

The Battle of Yorktown.

And the same one African Americans threw when

They first heard of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Because love, we are finally free.