1992: Love Deluxe, Sade

By Demetrius ‘Meech’ Buckley

A saxophone warps through the speakers, the harp thumb-strokes like picking scabs back into sores —

Sade sings:

I can see through

all of your lies, but

still I miss you

I lie in my dark room, a cordless phone pressed to my ear, talking to a girl who has my entire core on fire. We are fourteen and making up for the fourth time. Moms is in the next room, off into a sultry correction of her own notes; her lover, I'd imagine, is sipping warm liquor in a brown bag, Newport clinched between his fingers. The story of their meeting matches our story.

Theirs began up the street at a hole in the wall bar, jukebox playing Mom’s favorite song, “Cherish the Day.” Ours starts at a hole in a wall mall, sampling, “Your Love is King” in the record store. There's something about Sade and love that spins us towards people we could trust with our hearts, but also turns us towards the people who broke them too. Moms and her dude were on their ninth or tenth or –- too many makeup-breakups for me to count – and my girlfriend and I were still in our single digits. Though expressing myself had been difficult, Sade made me feel that love was the way into any girl's heart.

Why you love me? I ask her over the telephone.

You funny, tall, and you never judge me. Why u love me? She returns.

My feet rustle together under a comforter, the green light from the stereo on my dresser glows in my dark room; the low hum of pulse helps me to carefully consider my next words.

You make me feel like I'm real...like, I can exist when I feel alone.

Oh, she utters.

We remain quiet for too long; I think I said the wrong thing. I stumble to follow up with something as simple as I love you. For me, being genuine had been spittin' game and I spit it when honesty was needed to be in place.

Our breaths tangled on the phone line like wind gusts – what is she thinking? Sade answers: (Is it a crime, that I still want you and I want you to want me too?)  I feel a fifth breakup coming, our third falling-out following into our fourth.

You cheated on me, Demetrius, so how can you feel so alone?

I hear moms' yell at her lover in the next room, and I begin to split into halves.

(Sometimes I think you're just too good for me). Sade’s coming through the walls and she tells me there's a quiet storm coming. I hang up and run toward the thunder, into that space that has my moms enthralled with her lover, where there is too much light for me to escape, to accept, to explain:

Momma, don't say he ain't mean it.

Momma, what am I to do

caught in a web of excuses? Be a fly, ant, or a beetle?

My girlfriend must be the hand

who tosses me in and says, feed.

Sade's Love Deluxe lived with us, spoke volumes in uncompromising situations. When I heard her voice it meant someone's emotions would be released into the world; someone would be forced to reckon a cause right after the song had stopped. Almost every night our little apartment filled with an orchestra of instruments — I hadn't yet found the words to explain how I felt about a lot of things, but Sade's band soothed the words out of me, making it easy to learn why and how things worked. Permission to love was like a thousand sand storms of winter blizzards, and words that summon the hottest summers welted flower beds. What I knew was I had Sade and Sade had me, my moms, and our dreams.

Corridors cold without socks and shoes —

where are you going?

away from here, away from

all of your scars

left from your pissy frowns.

My mother's designer shades distracted people from the real question that hid behind those frames. But they couldn’t distract me. He, her lover, would eventually be back and I'd be here, waiting, not forgetting, wanting whatever answer he had to offer up. I struggled long enough to pull him out of that apartment, the odor of Hennessey blowing out his nostrils, his busted lip with his teeth sucked in tight enough for the blood to stop. My mother's designer shades were tinted black. She wore them to the grocery store, to grandma's house, in the apartment, to church, to dinner, and to bed. What was there in her sleep that would question her swollen eye?

All night Sade is on repeat:

Is it a crime?

Is it a crime

that I still want you,

and I want you to want me too.

My friend killed himself over some girl who didn't want him. Moms, on her second bottle, killing herself like some dude didn't want her.

I can’t give you more than that

surely you want me back.

Why u ain't call me today? my girlfriend asks

I hold the phone, thinking of a way out. This repeat affair barking into my bones aches, and the voice that once adored my imagination is speaking to me. I too meet the point of no return. Sade is in the living room drunk, dancing around the table, her lipstick pressed over a rim's glass. I take twenty Tylenols, smoke a blunt stuffed into a cigar wrapping. (Hungry for love and thirsty for the distance).

Welcome me into a fitted sleeve.

Hold me

from me.

I'm talkin to you! my girlfriend shouts.

But I hang up to leave her yelling to an open void. Dizzy, I welcome the ash of saints pressed against my forehead. I want to die in this exact moment — Is it a crime that I still want you and I want you to want me too? (I can't give you more than that.)

Before I finish off the bottle, I write:

I am yours

but so much of me is going

toward a fragrant.

I am yours

in the shallow end

but

not in the deep

where we can hear our sounds.

Wind fiends embrace

body like cushions in coffins

and there

I am yours.

I am yours.

I am yours.

I am forever yours.

I keep seeing my friend spinning a silver revolver, a click, a boom that thuds into my ear drum. I keep seeing a naked man forcing himself on a half naked momma, Sade singing Smooth Operator. Not by the city lights, but by the TV glare. My mother’s lover speaks to her in that voice, saying, I bet you know what to do at the end of the day. He’s up against her. He notices me, eases up from behind her. 

They came to cut my tusks

wild in this jungle.

You gave me back

cuz like Sade's Jezebel

I denied where I came from.

Lifting myself off my bed I realize what is given to me. A gift. A sense of constraint  in order to reconstruct in words. What is given to Moms is an area of memory, Sade's mixes and a coping mechanism that'll pitch out into another song.

I pay no attention to my Mom’s lover, know the next time Sade is playing in our apartment I'd have to fight, if not for my Moms then for the words to express.

Demetrius Buckley’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee, PEN America, RHINO, and the Michigan Quarterly Review, where he won the 2020 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets. He is the winner of the 2021 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize.