I don't remember how I hurt myself,

The pain mine.

Long enough for me 

to love the wound that invented it.

As none of us knows the beauty 

Of our own eyes.

Until a man tells us they are,

Why God made brown. Then

That same man says he lived to touch 

The smoothest parts, suggesting our 

Surface area can't be understood

By degrees of satin. Him I will 

Follow until I am as rough outside 

as I am within. I cannot locate to origin 

Of slaughter, but I know 

How my own feels, that I live with it 

And sometimes use it 

To get the living done,

Because I am what gladiators call 

A man in love-- love 

Being any reminder we survived. 

                                                    - Jericho Brown