Forrest Gump

Lyrics

Forrest Gump (from I Think I'm Ready to See Frank Ocean) You called me your Jenny. I asked if that made me a whore and you the idiot, which you didn't find funny. I was envisioning our lacquered bodies adjoining in a language we have finally grown up enough to speak. We could rap for hours: into tape recorders, over your mother's kitchen island, in bowls of shito and cod fish and rice. You call me out when years later I come home and ask if "someone will pass me the pepper, please." Sometimes I was the whore and you were the idiot. You threaten not to let me eat it, as if I have forgotten the taste of lightning or ash or you- r Ghanaian mother's nipple which, I believe she sometimes used to feed the both of us. My fingertips and my lips still burn [from the cigarettes]. There were times when my mother begged yours not to wash us in the same bath and she did not listen, cleansing the cruel Puritanical stench of our Middle-American upbringing in sponges and bubble soap. I think about how your hair always smelled of anise. The bright pink bud of your still-fresh circumcision, I was too young to understand, or understand why I remember this, or why when your Ghanaian father finally tried to hide our nakedness from each other—as we grew older, together, and too unashamed —your mother called this wanderlust "showing off." Sometimes I was the whore. When I fly in to visit your parents you show up high, driving a black BMW, raiding the French door refrigerator for Swiss cheese and grass-fed milk. You lift your lips to the carton, catch me watching your arm flex into a murder of crows, a million shattered shingles. Lord, make me a girl.          So I can fly far,          far away from here, from every away that led me far from this. You are like a song in a broken photograph. You say, when I got married it broke your heart, but I kept asking my heart "Home, where are you?" You drive back to Baltimore for your girlfriend, through the deer-scattered forest of the rest of this country. I lay in the dark, in your parent's guest room, wanting to touch myself against the furniture, to feel like the roar of a car engine between my legs, but instead lay naked as a question while I fall asleep knowing every man that will ever touch me will not be you, no matter how fast I run in my dreams. Sometimes I was the idiot. My phone is vibrating at three am, are-you-still -up?, although I haven't heard from you in months and I almost think you are wanting to say we've lost someone. Still, at three am what could a beautiful man have to say that isn't bad news. I'm not married now. Maybe you've heard it. Maybe you are drunk and Patrón helps you pretend you are a lion. I ask you a bout the music you are still trying to skin around, a reason to make this story into record, and in some small way I still believe your heart-song is an elegy to the time that grew between us— like going from a beautiful child to an awkward doll—and the wilderness that fills everything else. Sometimes you were the whore. You don't call for a year. The next time I see you, we at your father and mother's Ghanaian dwelling, toasting the blessings of a Middle-American upbringing With Australian Shiraz and two Ivy League imported cousins. I touch your perfect arm, branded in a sleeve of ink from the stint you did upstate. When I ask you, you don't talk to me about any of it. You say I am too removed, too unavowed to know how your skin feels underneath, this world you have put on in cuffs. Perhaps you knew no other way to assimilate than to be shackled by this country's past —this Middle-American upbringing. You are its native son, its black boy dressed in the suit of a man uncertain what that means yet. My fingertips and my lips still burn from the past. These new lashes upon your arm like the burn from cigarettes. Don't you know you run my mind boy?          …running on my mind. Boy:: a picture of our first kiss is still stashed in my childhood belongings. We are at the Renaissance fair. You are carrying a sword and I, wear a princess crown. Sometimes we were the idiots who believed the future was just the past made naked and whole, again.