after Terrance Hayes’ poem, “How to Draw an Invisible Man”

1.                     And when the scene sets just right, the trees 
grey wind bursting from my father’s cuticles, i discovered 
he had been hoarding his mental strife in the silver capping 
of his iridescent crooked teeth all these years
2.                                                                                  raw & reeling,     
boyhoodpast shiny film noir under his eyelashes, mumbling 
about his dead & gone parents’ grey hairs, grief left on the back 
burner of his daughter’s developing mind 
3.                        transparently,                             he has been here 
many times before, sweeping tactile trauma into the mouths
of tiny bullets, soaring into a void of clinical darkness setting
on a night full of whistling teeth & empty echoes bouncing 
off a house cooled by fire                                 his darkness is
mine & my mothers’ to hold & coddle to sleep, it’s my turn
to face the burning of our shared mentals, melting into the
same sickness, freckling onto our faces, my beauty mark is a
blackhole mirroring my mother’s pupils, blown wide & searching
for imposter in his trained smile                             avensburg court,
a cul-de-sac of cracking appearances & corked up wine trembling down
scarred arms, he thinks everyone wants to know each story shrouded
in his infantile hands        impressing white people         a hot pass time
4.                                                 but they just want a glance of his pseudo 
whiteness on the backdrop of his daughters’ darkening face, they 
want to hear her speak back in tongue foreign to her bio makeup, 
wanna close their eyes & see their own children’s laughter sprouting 
out her mouth, her aura’s codeswitching phantom stuck to the back 
of her neck like a leech
5.                                                                                                he’d gladly watch
her emotionblood pool if it means he can gloat about the obedient 
walkingcorpse left in the wake of his zealous & lost identity