1.

Match a bandanna with the color of the red puffer overcoat. Tear out the fur lining
and toss it on your living-room floor. Remember

you’ll find humanity and peace wherever you see
the most overlapping graffiti tags.

2.

Okcupid

is a social experiment now. I was so fucked up on
intermittent fasting and breakups, shit does love even

exist anymore?

3.

Get grass blades stirred up in the spokes of an e-bike
bounding over an abandoned grave.

If you both bring a piece of tupperware
you have to call it a picnic. That’s just
the truth.

That cornbread was the truth.
That cornbread was time travel.
That cornbread was Aretha Franklin with a hot combed afro
  no bra and a thin sweater dress on soul train
   chromecasted to where we could
   marvel together in silence.

4.

Hate-watch Hamilton.

Then

take a walk until you come to a stop sign scrawled with the words:
“Riots work.” Your date takes off

her mask for the first time, black
with rose petals shattering across the face, and behind it
a Gothy Rihanna looking lipstick they
try not to smear. Damn,

it’s so beautiful today. The sun. The way it feels

   like a new kind of light.

5.

Talk about black owned gun clubs and what happens after grad school.
There is a part of Philly so white they sell Frosé in a field
beside brunch tables
overflowing with Comcast. Go to the brewery with the chalk
art outside it
instead and talk about your 90s RNB kick like it’s magic.

6.

Have a favorite gif to send. WAP when appropriate. Can’t
go wrong
with Drake, the Rock or that baby yoda person. Make it a
thing.

7.

I read about trauma bonding by myself
on an instagram post before I text. On messenger
you can have conversations that last

all day and now there is a gradient of skin tones
and hearts possible, maybe all of them are love.
All day with little gaps full of
memes and computer jobs we have somehow have held on to while the world
marches to our death.

8.

I don’t know Body Count that well but I respect the hell
out of them so that’s dope.
Talk about
happiness
as I’m up and I
ate and I worked out today. I’m not sick and things are
happening. None of my family
are sick.

Love was
not
the truth last year. Love was getting
hollowed out. Love was how much you loved
Kanye West. How much we all did and now
another black man is dead and I
just want to keep my job.

9.

Imagine travel but if you go, I mean. It’s a lot. Make a
travel playlist but listen to it yourself mostly.

So many people I know
lost their job and also got new ones.

It’s just a miracle, everything.

I don’t know.

10.

Yeah I’m basically a top but I’m not into needle play.
Stare at the bedroom frame
like it’s a set. Forget the way you’re suppose to hook your
index finger.
When did this all become so much work?

I don’t
understand my body. What is a body anymore? Thirst
isn’t a reason to be with someone, thirst is the reason
you drink Sprite.

Youtube and poems and the news and shows I’m suppose to binge and my ex and
everything but everyone that actually loves me says,
love only really exists as a way to convince yourself to
not give a fuck about anyone. Maybe
they would say it to my face too
if I wasn’t a man.

Space is infinite
and so precious, love. The using of that word between
the delivery service of whoever is
fortunate enough to have a car. The using of that word with every friend.

I don’t know what’s happening. I’m writing a lot about
what I want for the first time and

if you want, I want you to stay.

11.

Makeout. There’s a word for it and it feel like
an old sitcom that only exists now
as a stream.

I don’t even really
understand why it feels so good. Lips full, almost chapped
bunched together and blushing.

Pulled against each other like a cute kid’s face
smashed against their great grandma’s
plush leather chair.