Poetic Justice.

A Poem by Joshua Lean

Something that came after listening to Kendrick Lamar.

I write songs in these poems,

Dedicated to you.

I build wars

in these lines,

look

At all the people I slew.

Feel the tremble of my treble
As it works its way around your shoulders,
Familiarising itself with the shape of your bones.
Back and forth,
Like a scavenger.

Let your fists form,
Where my sentences break,
And let my q curve
With the nape of your neck

Like poetic justice.

If your chest swells
With the curvature of my strokes
Would you bend with me?
Until the only justification we need
Can be found in the spaces
These words contain.

Floating ribbons
Have a song,
There’s a thing they do
Like da da da da..
It reminds me of
The way your hair blows
In rhyme and metre.

How every strand sways thick
With metaphor,How your back alludes to a lost continent,And your eyes the alliterations of legend.

The breaths you breathe
Are euphemisms for
Unequivocal shards of glass
That sink deep into the fingers
Of gods who’ve been away too long.

There are no Kendrick Lamar songs for the way
Your epicanthic folds are
The places paradoxes go to
Find meaning and a glass of water,
So we would sit in this silence
Until it raps to our thirst

Swagger in step.
Step in swagger.

Straddling punchlines like a death bed.
Like a death bed’s remix.

I just had an epiphany.

Now,if I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room
How would you hold it?
Would you start by tickling my petals with songs that refuse to make love to tongues?
Or would you let the tears from your eyes bathe my fragrant essence into submission?

Of course there would be nowhere left to grow.
Because there are not enough Poes and enough Brownings to inspire the leaps we take in these verses.

And muses have a time to die.

We would stop short,
We would fall,
Because there are punctuations
We do not yet know how to use.
Because we are all the poems
We have not finished.

-JSL