Poetess's Honey (memoir)

“Look at me" Rob’s voice boomed in my eardrums. He commanded me, his voice wrapping around my joints, causing my body to flex more for him to pierce even the hardest to get places.

"Daddy", my voice purred underneath his big body.

The sounds that his muscular body made slamming into me, help took my mind off the pain of my upper butt against the steel of my old steam radiator. The apex of my chin fit into the spot between his shoulder blade and neck. I moaned into his skin, feeling my body pulse, teem and gush with erotic energy throbbing against him. I fought to not lose myself in him. I …couldn’t lose…fuckkk…myself…in this… I got lost in-between the rays of silvery, sensual, summer moonlight that danced in my irises. I felt his sweat roll down my forearm, his sweat caught among the follicles of my vellus hair. I ricocheted between pain, pleasure, lust and an itch inside my heart begging to unroll off my tongue. I stared, into his eyes, the color of golden expensive champagne. He was so tall, 6”5’, a titian awakened in NYC. His features a mixture of black warriors and blended races of Puerto Rican beaches. His jawline was angled and straight, like God himself chiseled his jawline from ancient figures left in forgotten sacred temples. He had a beauty mark under his right eye, and a diagonal gash through his left eyebrow from when he hopped a jagged fence running from cops. His hair was waves of jet black silk. His lips were a plump rose gold color tinged burgundy around the circumference from the weed he smoked. His complexion a sandy yellow-brown color, like muddy Belizean beaches in dawn and I was in love with the way he touched me.

No, it was the way he looked at me, the passion always radiated off of him like ripples, like he broadcasted me a signal only I could hear. One that made my body come alive under neon and orange starlight from the street. An aura that would make me glow for him in the shade of my Bronx apartment in the slivers of moonlight coming through reflecting off my red-brown skin. My skin and features painting me in a "glaze", exotic undertones like I came from an island, islands that held secrets among the coconuts and pineapples; and I was his secret. A secret that killed me in agonizing truth.

“I love you," Rob said, his right hand cupping the left side of my jaw, his thick thumb tracing the outline of my lips.

I felt his words get heavy. Burn and rip into my skin like he shot me point blank. I felt my mood switch like a flash flood. I maneuvered my body off my windowsill. Mercury emotions flooded my chest cavity, making me feel like I couldn’t breathe. I sat down quickly on my bed and looked at him intensely. A mechanical stare.

"Do you really?" I asked softly, conjuring vulnerability like a newborn baby rabbit and just as timid with my questioning. My eyes that were just cold, wavered and blurred, saltwater pulled from my tear ducts, collecting like clouds before the storm.

"What about your wife?” I said unmoving. I found out by trying to surprise him at his condo in the city. It was our anniversary of meeting or so I thought. There was a surprise in store iight.
There it was, I couldn't hide from the truth anymore. You see, there was a jambalaya of truths. Truths I learned. My truth. His truth. The world's truth. The raw magnetic truth of passion. He was in love with her since he was 15. His childhood sweetheart. Wifey, a cursed title, I'd depressingly never bare. She captivated him with the effortless way she could create beauty from his pain. The softness of her words melted him.
There he was 28, “straight” until he met me. A 21-year-old blossoming flower. A new T-girl who looked soft and girly, bam, freak accident. I fall face first on the pavement, drunk and clumsy, instantly burning with red-hot embarrassment in front of the bodega near my apartment building.  He helped me up after I fell, inebriated, 21 and he looked into my eyes. Intensity, like a candle, knocked on old cardboard boxes. He was burning from the moment he saw me. I cooled him with my truth. I was a girl who blurred gender lines.

"I'm a special girl. Very special. Like ... t-girl special...l"

I resurrected something he killed inside of himself.  The attraction he shot fatality in the head, because he was a man, specifically because he was a black man. An attraction he never followed because he was hood, masculine and he couldn’t risk it.

“Girls like me couldn't be sexy. They are off limits. The girls who blend magic and science into flesh. Be wary, before they bewitch you and you lose everything important. Status, like currency, do you really want to gamble?”
But he did. He gambled and fucked me like his body was made for mines.

Moon rays hurled dimmed lights of allure
Golden star showers that singed my skin in cherry red embers
I danced for him, softly calculated, moving this breaking body in lust and love
There was no door so he created one deep in my inner flesh
Castle walls can be made into a bridge
Between bed sheets and darkness that shed hidden light,
Hidden Masculine Truths
He ran from the world, compartmentalized, but never from me.
I excavated his truth through my sex like a worm seeking the moistest place on earth

He touched my body and I saw color dance across his lips. He slid in me, and this wasn't just a secret or a substitute fantasy. I was his love he chose like a Joe Trace in Toni Morrison’s Jazz. He chose me. The one who could have had his ring if this was another lifetime.

Complexion like desert sand
Painted fiery sex and smoldering kisses,
He conjured me to love, a love doll filled with light mountain air
HE BROKE ME.
 Shattered me so softly,
My first lesson in metamorphosis to be a woman.
Love is a weapon against women
Butterflies are beautiful until men nail them to walls
Honey can drown and suffocate.

"I'm getting married in two weeks", Rob said staring at the grey swirling patterns of my area rug. His big toe tipped over his size 14 Jordans.
"So you can't see me no more?" I asked, with my confident face on. Inside though, I was a splintering Crystal Palace. Sailor Moon on a dying moon kingdom.

"If I met you first. If I didn't live the life I have lead. If I could hold your hand and not be judged I would. But my family, my children. The guys I run with, the guys I grew up with, you don’t understand. The world. I'd be cut off. I’m from the street, live by it. Cut off from blood, that’s what would happen.  Death, several deaths. You are so sweet though, and tender, like my favorite fruit. But I can’t. You understand, right, Daisy, right?"

And there it was, reality like a punch to my eye, how dare I feel, how dare I want, who told me I could freely love, who told me there wouldn't be sacrifice, emotions, and intimacy, love? Was that my sacrifice? A year huh, gone, him telling me his life, a year telling my dreams, things that terrified me, his smile that always melted away my bad moods, the sweetest way he touched my face and called me “my pretty thing” when I wasn’t paying attention, the scruff of his beard scraping against my body, laying in upstate NY fields filled with wildflowers staring at rainbows, clouds, and sunsets, getting high and talking about past lives, nirvana and is love really forever? Those masculine hands on my body, tugging underneath my thighs when he wanted me under him, his hard stomach, cut and defined, his pretty champagne color eyes, I got drunk off, when the candles of restaurant tables reflected in them, I’d trace his 13 tattoos when I would get sleepy, outlining the one on his neck the most, a dragon, forest green eyes, blood red scales with fire coming out its mouth, picnics in Bear Mountain, getting lost in a mass of Georgia pines, making love amongst cicadas and mosquitos that bit me up because I wanted to smell good for him, many dates at night, us cruising late night on FDR or west side highway to nowhere or to attack all NYC nightlife, the way it felt with my legs wrapped around his mid-section in the Pacific Ocean, his surprise trip for me last minute for spring of my 21 years being alive, the way he innocently, annoyingly, sweetly gnawed his teeth in his sleep, the way he would grab me and roll me into him, his chin on my forehead, his relaxed breathing and his sex filled sleeping voice, “you my favorite comforter, D”,  lake houses in Connecticut, the way I could rack his mind, quizzing him on things, he was hood, but intelligent, I didn’t have to dumb myself down with him, the deepness of the rattle of his raspy voice when he would stare until I woke up and he would say “Good morning, my beautiful flower”, the moment we made love until sunrise in a Cali hotel room, with the balcony doors open, the taste of champagne on my tongue, the luminosity of the orange-bluish rays, making us glow like demi-gods/goddesses, the smell of the Pacific Ocean imprinting itself in my nose follicles,  him buying me a kitty, I named Carmen, a white long haired cat with orange spots and a cute birthmark on her nose, his kisses, his hands, his eyes, all of it, awoke something in me, deep in me and I was supposed to just crush it, like my love was a rat in a mousetrap. I was transgender, so my love could be exterminated like vermin. I wasn't worthy of love because I wasn't worthy of life, secret taboo dolls, transgender women deserve death, but this, this death made me implode. This was worst then labels painted on by society: Tranny, he/she, MAN, worse than the threat of transgender murders, this, this, this... Sweet deaths hurt the worst, a red-hot needle slowly poking your aorta.

I remembered the sweetest memory I held ferociously in the sunken chest in my subconscious.  The moment I realized I was utterly entrenched in his being, drawn to him like a mosquito to a bug zapper. The memory of when he made love to me near a lagoon in rural Georgia:

Whispers of baritone pungent rasp submerge my earlobes in him, the sweet scents of almond and shea on the middle most part of my septum, his essence marking me
This was a street warrior's reprieve, he was a muse from the Gods with a jagged scar on his left eyebrow.
The sounds of cicadas and the buzz of bees zipping by made me feel depersonalization, my body against the red Georgia dirt blending in like I was Earth, dust and mud swirling around alabaster structures, clay dolls breathing life into each other, small speckles of the universe that were given luminosity.
His kisses hungry, rose gold lips that softly seduce succulently / then a bite like this realm where we laid was primal, the trees grew like lost sentinels, and the lagoon wasn't black but teal with almost pearlescent magical smelling magnolias in bloom.
Masculine vulnerability isn't a concept, but real with blood and muscles and capillaries and cartilage and tattoos, a jagged scar cutting diagonally down his left eyebrow. Mines, mines, mines, mines, mines, mines, mines, my lost anchor.
He was a ghetto mercenary defining life through war, jagged edges like broken trees lined his silhouette. I was soft, a bank of a small upstate New York stream, hurdling to the Hudson. Slow, slow, slow, we divined the magic to stop time through our kisses. Chrono-kinesis.

        It was the way he looked at me. His eyes were laced with plutonium, he would stare at me until all my cells would die and resurrect in his irises. In his eyes, I was a world amongst this world, a doorway to a parallel world. I was another lifetime, a second life. A life where love with a transgender woman could be possible for him. It was the way he touched me. He was sweet, but unyielding, a tempestuous lover who loved to hear my sex cries. In the same breath, he was gentle, he'd rub my face softly, gently licking my chin, his gentle way of ownership. I was his. It was his smell. He smelt like roasted chestnuts and Shea butter, a warm earthy smell that delighted my nose every time I made him sweat.  It was him

He loved me, like a woman, he loved me for the first time in my life, as my completely authentic self.  How would I get over that unscathed?  He opened my heart, renewed through estrogen and happiness, to choke it with the heel of his big size 14 Jordans.  A woman is a casualty of love.

My marrow left trails on my face as it came down
I felt this, hollow bone, the truth of us, settle into my tender femur.

He kissed me sweet, one last time, honey-laced kisses

 Singing my moans of lust and agony as he slid in me

My unique body shivering in his arms,
 He unmarked the spots he had made all over my body
Unmarked all our time
My body reacting against his body how it always came alive
He slid deep into me, filling a part of me and breaking the part more submerged
Suck the marrow from me, dehydrate my love
         I drowned in sweet honey
Suffocate me, Daddy.

"Maybe I can still see you", he said with a little hope in his eyes.
"Maybe not", I replied short and blunt.
"I'll always love you. You know that, right Daisy. You weren't just my first T-girl, you pulled something else out of me. Something I didn't know I had for girls like you. I hate seeing you cry. But I'm just being honest. If this world were mine. You'd be mine. But she deserves me. So come here, don’t cry. I’ll never forget you, never, ever. Please come here, D, we still going to be good, we can still be cool, right?"
 Making me fall before I knew of her.
Her, who’s more than me
I painted you a story with my body
A Trans love story
I loved honey
The taste clinging to life and my taste buds
Now, l drink moonshine
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth
I learned to love,
In perpetual insecurity of love
My door closes softly,
He left.
My heart seeped out in the honey crawling down the inner part of my thighs
Death crawled in through the splinters in the wall of my chest
Rigor Mortis of my heart.
His lies and truths collected me
A golden chalice filled unfiltered platelets of my love
  And he left with it.

I saw his truth in candlelight and sweat and sex
 The way he stared like the universe was in me
But sometimes.
Just sometimes,
Truth is not enough.
Give me passion filled with sunlight.
21, too young
Honey can burn like lye if you leave it too long.
________________________________________________________________
(5 winters passes me by)
I dropped my fork full of honey garlic glazed salmon. There he was, Rob, popping up like a strong hex out the blue. Still glowing that same golden light he had when I had met him 5 years ago. Still, breath-taking, the light champagne color eyes, rose gold lips tinged with burgundy melting hearts and panties. He was still beautiful, like a huge Black/Puerto Rican mixed golden statue. He laughed, leaning into a beautiful woman the color of coffee, cream, and sugar. I watched in total silence, hearing the crackle of the candle wick on my table. I didn't know how to feel. I felt like a voyeur watching someone else’s life.

The waves lapped against me, the slow rock of waves against cliff sides. The pull of the moon, causing tidal waves. He still pulled at something inside me. Three small children ran around him. Golden children, the same color as him with silky pillow curls

"Daddy, can we go to the park? Please!" All tugging at him. Energy and youth bounding in their steps. I watched my food, watched the steam dissipate as I sat glued, watching, and feeling like a stranger to my own life.

"Ok, okay, sit down. We are in a restaurant." He said sternly but with love. Smiling. Still had a beautiful smile. It’s like he didn’t age at all. His deep resonance of voice still boomed. I shuddered.  

So many nights, so many days, I thought of what I would say to him. First, it was anger, fuck that, it was rage. Young rage begging me to curse him out, fuck up his car, go to his job, tell his wife. Break up his happy little family. Show his wife all the pictures and texts. Be petty. Be a woman scorned. Vengeance is thy own; all that shit. But as I grew, so did my thoughts and emotions.  In the place of the tenant Rage, in moved a new renter, Heartbreak.

Why, why, why would you make spring grow in my heart, to just burn it down? Why, why, why?
But sitting there, 5 years older, 5 years wiser, words didn't come. All I felt was silence, a void, the sounds of the bottom of the ocean when the pressure blows your eardrums out. I was numb. I was so deep in my thoughts I didn’t feel the stare of those golden eyes. The pull of the moon. I looked up to the same eyes that used to glow in the morning for me. Eyes with light, and a truth, a fractured truth but a truth none the less. His face had changed. Like someone had sucked out all the air in the room. I saw it for a second. Fire still burning there. Burning, burning, golden fire.
Then a smile. A slow-spreading smile of opportunity.

I ordered my check. Threw my arms into my coat sleeves in a hurry. Emotions clashed in me. Anger, love, disappointment, wonderment. Memories like threads tangled in one big mass in my mind. I had to get out! I felt my blood pump, the red blood cells bumping furiously against the walls of my arteries. I felt my mind focus, tunnel into a goal. I cleared three blocks in 30 seconds. A gentle grab of my arm stopped me.

"So you couldn't say hey?” his deep voice boomed softly, his breathe exerting hard against the back of my right earlobe.

Honey, honey. Honey in his voice
Honey drowning my heart.

               "For what? Why would I?" I said sassily.
"Damn" he took a step back and put his hands in his coat

He seemed thoughtful. People moved around us like red blood cells in a body.
And we stood in the middle, like cancer. Two stone cancer cells.

"Can I talk to you for a few minutes”, he stared at me, uncaring of the people staring at us for standing right in the middle of the sidewalk in the middle of a cold January.

"No, you can't. Isn't your family waiting for you? Your Wife". I said with more ill feelings than I meant. I just wanted to run. Love didn't occupy my brain or my heart anymore. Fuck love. “I thought long and hard, for a while. What I would say. What I would do. I don't want to do anything. You mean nothing to me. You are nothing. There’s nothing to say because I don't give a fuck."

There it was. Anger. Anger undiluted, sheathed in fake nonchalant-ness. I hated him. I hated how he caused my heart to beat wildly. I hated that he was so goddamn beautiful.

"Just give me five minutes, please" His eyes looked at me wavering but intense. Like he was staring at something lost but found. We sat on a bench on a quiet small street. We settled against a red brick building of a Café on a side street in Harlem. There was an awkward silence and a two feet space that said so much.

"You look the same, but different, in a good way, Daisy. You were always beautiful. But now, now you are stunning." He stared at me, and I stared at the cars passing by. The pigeons passing in the sky that I had hoped would shit on his face. A group of children playing tag in a small community garden.

"What's your point? What's the point of any of this?! Didn't you make it clear 5 years ago?! I’m a fucking tranny right so I don't deserve love. Don't deserve you. It’s not "Right". I’m leaving. Fuck you. Fuck your life. Fuck you children and your wife. I hope I never see you again, you stupid light skinned bastard."

I stared at him finally. I wanted him to see what he caused in the aftermath of his choice. The youthful, innocent sweetness that drew him like a bee, now was venom. Sexy, feminine venom no man could handle. Something happened I didn't expect. Marrow dripped from my face with a force I wasn’t expecting. I tried to angrily wipe them away. I wouldn’t dare let him see me break. But, I was breaking. Damn estrogen, I thought to myself. With all this anger, resentment, and hate I was still breaking. I hated him, I hated him, and I hated him!

"I'm sorry. I'm... really... sorry..." his right hand gripped my left wrist. The crack in his voice caused me to look at him. My fire turned to embers as I looked and l listened. He was crying. Those golden eyes, dripping crystal tears. His body shook softly, as he inhaled, and shook some more. He let the emotions escape his heart and the words fly free from his mind.
"I always loved you. It was always you. Me and my wife still live together, but we aren't together. We are just there for the kids and living together to save money. We trying the whole “co-parenting thing”. She says I’m a good dad, at least I didn’t fuck up at that. I couldn't get you out my heart, Daisy. So I tried to substitute you with other t-girls. But none of them had that softness I needed, that passion in their eyes. My wife found out, and we've been dying ever since. I couldn’t get you out my mind. The way you light up in the morning when you caught me staring. The cute way you would chew on a pen when you were trying to focus. That you pushed me, mentally. The way you’d lose yourself in writing, so cute and intense. I loved the way you ramble about the world. I loved the way you rub my scalp when you know I had a long day. Most of all I loved your smile. Your laugh, the way you stared like I was the only man in the world. It’s the way you love like you were created to love. And... And I’m sorry... I hurt you. I hurt you deeply. I can see it. It’s there behind your eyes. I fucked up huh. I’m a forever fuck up. I was so scared. Scared of what the world would think if they knew. So I ran. I’m a coward. But I been living with my choice. But I don't want you living with it. It’s strangling u. I feel horrible.  You get it though, right Daisy?  I’m a man, a man, Daisy. It’s hard when it comes to sexuality. I love women, and I love transgender women, but the world wouldn’t understand that.  You always amazed me with the way you never gave a fuck.  Is it bad if it does bother me?  I just didn’t mean to hurt you, please say you forgive me. I’m not perfect … I’m not always self-assured…"

He shook and cried and stared at me with truth in his golden glistening eyes. I felt reversed. I didn't feel anger anymore. Just a deep sadness. Deep like water collecting under roots of flowers that connected under caskets. Collecting into small underground ravines that collected in deep underground wells.

"You hurt me, Rob. You hurt me so badly, I felt like I splintered. 21 and young. You hurt me and I fractured trying to understand why you would hurt me. Why you caused me to glow in love. You never told me about her Rob, never.  Just to throw me back in the shadows. You made me feel unwanted. Discarded. Mad at my transgender life. Like my love is easily disposable. You... Hurt... me… Rob."
 I felt the tears come, pride or no pride. His eyes, golden knives, reopened these old wounds, and the marrow was pouring out. He stood up and moved closer, still towering over me.  

Golden giant, sad golden giant. Soft sad golden giant

"Come here." His tall body stood open wide, welcoming me home.

Even though my mind screamed no, my heart exhaled. I was exhaling, finally, exhaling. All my marrow dripped down his salmon color button up shirt. His chest cradling my head. His chin on my curls. What was this? He was the cause and now he was my redemption. Why. My brain screamed why but my body listened to the drums in my blood beating telling me to come home

"Even if I never see you again. Just know it was love. I loved you. I love you. I always will love you, Daisy. But don't become cold because of me. You’re so sweet, so warm, like a spring breeze, like Puerto Rican summers. Please don't shut down yourself. You’re the most beautiful woman I ever met. Even if it’s not me. Even if it’s another guy. I want you to be happy."

He gently lifted my head and kissed me softy like he was kissing my soul. Sometimes honey can burn, sometimes honey can drown but sometimes, just sometimes, honey can disinfect wounds. Even old, bitter, poisoned ones.