Author: Baylee

In a Tired Hotel Room in London

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The thrill that I felt
moments before
kissing you for the first time:
Electric
hypnotic
intoxicating;
charging the heavy air around us
as we lie in a dark room,
silently daring each other to make the first move.
The weeksdayshours we’d waited conflated
around us along with the distance
but the persistent inches between us
were still a chasm.
Your lips were a ledge
I was standing on the edge of
and beyond them
was all I’ve ever wanted
and had never known.
I counted down.
3…2…1…
Jump.
And I still haven’t stopped falling. 

Through Blurry Eyes

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 The rustle of skin
brushed up against sheets;
arms searching blindly
til finally you find me
and wrap yourself tightly around.
The crack in the drapes
lets the daylight pour in,
chests slowly rising
and falling and sighing
in rhythm with barely a sound.
The brush of my fingers
that slide up your spine,
mapping your jawline
and tracing your temple
and pulling your body in close.
It’s those placid minutes
before any words
are uttered
that I love the most.

Looking Healthy

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The millennial I am, I
tapped a heart on to your latest picture.
The millennial you are, you
thumbed a one-button affirmation back on mine.
17 years reduced to a series of zeros and ones
when all I want to do is say come home.

But if home is what you were escaping,
am I part of that demographic?
If home is what you were running away from,
then how can you say that you’re homesick?

If home is what you left behind then what exactly do you call where you are now?

And how did you decide he made the cut
and showed me up
and if you landed on my doorstep drunk again,
I might not open up so

yeah.
Maybe you were right.

Cos if you think the problem is at home,

then home’s the only thing you’ll ever know.

So I’ll Put Them Here

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These fragments
of the things that I
just wish I would have said
that night are words you may have learned to

use as stepping stones to meet
with me halfway

But if I go and say them
now I’ll be afraid I’m
weighing down the
raft you built with
flesh and bone to
float yourself away from home
and find whatever you
can call okay

Plato by Proxy

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The AP Stylebook has no guidelines about how to write a letter to someone in rehab.
I must have put pen to paper sixteen times before I could even write the letters
that make up your name.

How did we get here?
From nights spent lying in your bed
closing our eyes together instead
of waking up alone,
to this barely speaking
always fleeting
semblance of sentences.

Are you any more of a man than you were
in those moments?

Am I any less of a friend of
than I ever was?

The Pearls That Were His Eyes

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T.S. Eliot spoke to me
T.S. Eliot spoke to me
T.S. Eliot spoke to me
at four o’clock in the morning

I read him much of the night
upside down and backwards in my bed
clutching my head
as I tried to find a position comfortable enough
to breed sleep from the remnants of pain

I was determined 
to find in verse
whatever compelled me
to dust off the nearly century-old pieces
and indulge them in the middle of the night

But all I found
glowed into the words
at the violet hour
were abstracts and nonsense

Jug jug jug jug jug

I realized then that there are no such thing as signs 
only cheap coincidences
Aya ya kigeni si ya werevu
And that this pain is just a waste land
There’s no art in it