You peek in my door and think you know me, know who I am, that you know my name. You see me in my skirt today, the one with the dried food below the hip; the one my sweet baby girl wiped her mouth on as she stood grabbing my knees for stability, you think you know me and that I’m filthy or poor. You peek in and you surmise my demise, you revile my situation that you fail to understand, while you frown at my bare feet. These feet that are naked because I just finished playing in the mud with my girl.

You open books with blank pages and proceed to write about me, about my family, my dark skin and my name is yours to conjure, whatever your kiltered mind desires. You stab me with adjectives and cover me with your contrived imaginings…you wipe the knife on that skirt you barely remember, next to the dried food you do. But, you don’t know my name. Yet, your words become sentences, sentences that sit in a book, that sits on a shelf, that suddenly becomes truth, that grows into history.

Your history is based upon a glimpse, a glimpse through a door, that leads to my house, to my family, to my name. Your desire to know kills your desire to understand. Your need to be right surpasses your need to love while your ambition to be heard, drowns the truth. My door is not for your history, it’s for my release. It’s not for your scheming tongue to lick its way into my inner sanctum or for your tentacled fingers to rip pieces of my cloth and then dribble them across white pages. I have a name. I have more than you could ever see in that quick glimpse. You have walked away with nothing, a loss that will cling to you for as long as you run your crippled fingers across the soft leather of your corroded book of lies. The stench is yours not mine.

I have a name.