Ain’t no form       out here   
I’m your blade cleaving        leaving 
No throat uncut        stayin’ stacked on air     People sayin’        
you can’t make me happy           
police        this corner     Politicians     police everybody 
wants us dead—gentrify this hood like they 
got us bodied     but we movin’ our stars like chess pieces my love    
don’t give them one kill-toned drop     our love don’t split or spill f
or nobody         what new approach to killing they got we can’t yeet from      
promise      we gonna be        just fine        I’ll never stop this work. 
You               streetlights on clear nights       be my song     Your heart            
my beat-drop, joy dripping       between your fingers       palm-up        
holding down tomorrow         us wishin’ a motherf—look       

blood moving      heart to hands           
freein’ space     for    opps    wanting  to pull up.

Copyright © 2023 by John S. Blake. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 28, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Some poems, not unlike many lives, will never fit into sharp, strict expectations. Sonnets, like suburbs—manicured and cosmetically tolerable—gaslight us into thinking, This! This is what life/love should look like! No. Love, in all its intersections, demands that we be more realistic about how hard so many must fight to exist. Everyone deserves love, but a multitude of the marginalized must do whatever is necessary to live in our divine rights.”
—John S. Blake