Terrell Jamal Terry

Accidental Texture

 

 

I’d attempt to unravel your music, culling from the moon.

Inspiration reflects, bounces or sinks. I’m going to your river.

Quite often, it forms into trigger & arrow. Lime of artlust,

Anecdote. The ripest perishing. You move like tomorrow, today.

Where do you receive your energy? Where do you send?

A curiosity develops in the throat. It flows down to the abdomen.

I’ll code mine panic or catastrophic color (burgundy) made alive.

Pink locusts in a motioning mirror. Interest makes my little life.

I like the scents of a few toxic, cheap products, even if they burn

My evolution to the bone. A few waves of foreboding, too.

Conversation doesn’t shake it. Gold & red nylon dream-hairs.

My raggedy mathematics. To struggle with an allotment of latitude.

To fix a panel click. To go wordless, quickly. I was mad at pain, its

Unique protection. I glide my fingers along the pattern of a bold scar.

I glide my eyes across miniature poems. My life will be was—

Cloudy pillars. My body is night now. When will I call my brother?

Untitled (1)

 

 

We don’t need

To get naked,

But we should.

 

I want to stop writing about fire,

But I trust I will not.

 

On my side

Is the way

That I sleep.

 

Maybe we’re lonely,

Maybe it’s a competition for love.

 

Compassion haunts the sex conversation.

 

The energy burns

Away boredom, rewards hasty instinct.

 

I find myself curious

About valueless capacity.

 

I have no reliable picture of chemistries,

 

Meaning nothing

Except our entire world.

 

The sun & years are still what we named them;

Or they never were.

 

There’s too much life to last.

 

Forgive the body,

Another person

Is another person.

biography

Terrell Jamal Terry author photo
TERRELL JAMAL TERRY is the author of Aroma Truce (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, The Journal, Green Mountains Review, West Branch, Crab Orchard Review, Guernica, Washington Square Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Volta, cream city review, the anthology Bettering American Poetry 2015, and elsewhere. He resides in Pittsburgh, PA. Find him online at terrelljamalterry.com.