Yusef Komunyakaa - Anodyne lyrics

I love how it swells into a temple where it is held prisoner, where the god of blame resides. I love slopes & peaks, the secret paths that make me selfish. I love my crooked feet shaped by vanity & work shoes made to outlast belief. The hardness coupling milk it can't fashion. I love the lips, salt & honeycomb on the tongue. The hair holding off rain & snow. The white moons on my fingernails. I love how everything begs blood into song & prayer inside an egg. A ghost hums through my bones like Pan's midnight flute shaping internal laws beside a troubled river. I love this body made to weather the storm in the brain, raised out of the deep smell of fish & water hyacinth, out of rapture & the first regret. I love my big hands. I love it clear down to the soft quick motor of each breath, the liver's ten kinds of desire & the kidney's lust for sugar. This skin, this sac of dung & joy, this spleen floating like a compa** needle inside nighttime, always divining West Africa's dusty horizon. I love the birthmark posed like a fighting co*k on my right shoulder blade. I love this body, this solo & ragtime jubilee behind the left nipple, because I know I was born to wear out at least one hundred angels.