Do You Know My Voice?

Every author has a voice of their own.  Without any audible sound, one can come to recognize a favorite author or other individual authors based on their distinctive imprint on the way they put words together.  One of my poet friends and I like to challenge each other with games of Poetry Ping Pong.  What follows is the context of a recent game (played over texts) without any edits -- completely raw (other than line spacing I am adding here).  Do you know which stanzas are mine?  Can you guess the identity of the other poet?

Sinners either run
or they sit, stuck in the mire
loving the cool earth smell,
birth smell with less blood
and sweat.  Running makes
a body tired.

Eventually...

each of these choices reflects
the same color, earth-toned
and salted sour aftertaste as it is just pain
leaving the body replaced
with hope.  This palate sweet dew,
heavy with sacred time. 

St. Peter vacations here during Catholic holidays.

Sometimes, when the heat of hell
overlaps the space in the year
for salvation, as the choirs of heaven
take a break and watch reality TV
Harlem shaking a Gungham-style Macarena,
it is the more in everything
that ruined it for the rest of us
have enoughs.  American birthing pain
during a scheduled patriotic C-section
during the delivery of a stillborn
child named freedom.  R.I.P.

It is the whistle warning song before a firework bursts,
before the baby's mouth opens wide to wail against the world,
before the heart break happens and our feet do their own choosing
Payless size nines with a man-made upper.

Man is always on top,

even when he's on the bottom,
in the pit, bottomless, running again,
carrying sin like a flag with thirteen stripes
of red.

Castor oil covered, foul-tongued, ostrich-feathered
girls fill themselves, leaving me
empty, tattered and torn, like a national flag
of a country that no longer exists as it was
full of generous peoples.  This is archaic,
unrealistic and silly.  The world now demands
selfish self centered plastic media driven

images that have forced a national forgetting

of a simple hug.  Revelry sounds shrill,
automated.  Leaving the listener lonely,
satisfied in the fact that choices are limited
for peaceful, satisfying breath. So, I dance
like everyone is watching secretly folding
the flag with pomp as it will wave once again
when we remember we are we

or even...

just part of something greater.