What Nobody Has Ever Said To You

Hey,

wanna be on my basketball team?

Wanna join my fantasy league?

Could you grab that for me? Top shelf.

Thanks.

Hey,

would it be alright if I holler obscenities from the car window

and make you feel unsafe in your own neighborhood?

Is it cool if I denounce your full potential and blame it on the bible,

come up and grope you from behind and blame it on the alcohol,

blame it on my upbringing and the primitive state of my anatomy?

Hey,

how quickly can you adapt to regression?

I noticed your soul crawled out of your skin while I fucked you senseless.

Do you want to talk about it?

Daisy Buchanon was never really corrected when she said

The best thing a girl can be in this world is a beautiful fool.

Mama, you did all you could to prepare me

for all the things no one’s ever said to me:

I’d like to think my degree is plastered across my forehead,

and when people look at me they think,

Hey,

you look really intelligent,

but Mama nobody’s ever said that to me.

Maybe if I cut my hair real short, put on a snapback,

and change my aesthetic to cocky indifference,

people will call me a lesbian.

Nobody’s ever said you look like a lesbian.

Nobody’s ever said you look like a Jew,

but here I stand with the same blood coursing through me

that was spit on and smeared across ghetto asphalt,

the same blood that made it to freedom and

has been at war ever since, but

Hey,

continue to tell me this blood lacks credibility.

Continue to tell me my rights don’t matter.

Continue to tell me I’m oh-so-adorable like a fucking toddler.

If I had ten bucks for every time I heard the same damn pick up lines,

I’d be one rich, lesbian Jew.

Hey,

Tell me something I don’t know.

Nobody ever asked me what my aim is as a revolutionary.

What are you doing with your poetry,

and why should people care?

I ask myself that mid-anxiety attack,

spiral out, then have to redefine productivity: I got out of bed today.

Hey,

if I am going to have any sort of voice within my own generation,

then let it be honest and kind and loud.

Let it be the sort of voice that makes you and I both feel

like spiraling out does not mean we have failed.

Let it struggle to explain to future children

the meaning of the out-dated word ‘normal.’

I hope

nobody ever says to the young woman of the future,

Hey,

wanna go to a CEOs and Corporate Hoes party?

How about Pimps and Hoes?

Also, send nudes? #sendnudes