I sing
Like tortoises
Sprint
Like this country
Remembers
How it got here
Read as: I don’t sing
But loving you
Makes me wish
That I did. That I could
That this voice I was given
Was good
For more than wordplay
And these moonlit
Monologues
I want to talk
Vocabulary
Of beating hearts. All
Subterranean rhythms
And pulse
But
I’ve been building walls
For quite some time now
Too tall
For me to find my way
Out of
It wasn’t until
They were keeping me
From myself
That I realized
The walls we build
To protect ourselves
Become the same walls
We find ourselves caged within
Trapped behind
Waiting to find
Whoever it is
With whatever it takes
To break through
I want to sing
Scream
Language of storm
Swelling cloudscapes
Pregnant
With promises
Of Old World
Flood
The kind that gave birth
To first myths
Stitching antiquity
Together
Across continents
And creeds
I want to sing
Intangibles
Meaning
Deeper than English
Can approximate
The same eaglewing
Drumbeats quaking
Bloodstreams rapid
That
Racetrack rhythm
Shaving years
Off my life
Every time
Voice Breath
And Body
Find ways passed
These walls
The ones I've spent
18 years building
Until only a small
Trickled bloom
Of light
Leaking down
Was all
That ever got in
Each brick forged
From every tear I swallowed
Held back
Every memory
Of nopales
Dotting dreamscapes
Every little voice
Inside begging
I acknowledge
Numb hearts
And strength
Are not synonymous
I wish I could sing
No lyrics
Just throat swell
And spirit crying
Entrance into world
Feelings beyond
Definitions
Constructs
I wish my feelings
Found form
That was more Frank Ocean
Falsetto
And less Frank O’Hara
Letters
But
Words are all
I've ever been good at
I hate them
They always fall short.
4 Comments
I used to be radical Fire. (I know.)
That be it sugar or aspartame my taste buds will kill me. That flouride in water really is a concern (and other tin foil hatted shit like that). That my neurosis and insomnia will kill my cock by my forties. That I'll live to see the ruin we've wrought. That I really am my father's son. That the mind is a fragile thing. That if one happened upon the wrong thought one's sanity could unravel, like a ball of yarn becoming naught when the right thread is pulled. That my empathy is not endless. That every heartbreak detracts from the next. That my heart isn't big enough to lend to all who deserve it, and that my choices in this regard are poor and misguided. That my smiles aren't free. Beyond fear, I know this to be fact. They cost me a lot. That my life's work, my masterpiece, my magnum opus will remain unformed, still folded in the fabrics of my brainscape, trapped, waiting to be carved free, a formless rock that should have been more. That I'll never forgive the child that became me. In summary, I'm scurred, of a lot, despite my best efforts to pretend otherwise. Thanks for listening. (And if anyone asks, I'm brave as shit.) I used to fear
I would never find you That there was no you To find Fears you were fantasy Mirage I had Conjured forth From skyscape And dreams Teasing shapes From shadows Of 3 a.m. I had seen you Somewhere I would have sworn on it But when I searched You out Striking chisel To stone And sediment I was met only With sand I could not render I wrestled color From crow feathers And quetzal Mixed dye with dust Poured in rain drops Set mixture to mold In casts Curving body. Sway Rhythms of river And tide Made you Bright as midnight Black as moonlight Easy to hold close As smoke On wind I used to fear I would never find you Used to. “Sunsets in the desert seem like they’ll never end, until suddenly, before you know it, they’re done. It’s like someone just turned out the lights.” - Roberto Bolaño, 2666 The year of our love Was death throws Of daylight Blood rim of world And West Scrub brush And dune Turning tar pitch Skyline Star litter A nightly demise Of dusk Over desert It was beautiful It was eternities It lingered Seemed impossible It could ever burn out And then it did It's dirt. Just dirt. Nothing sacred about it. Or rather, no more than any other patch of dirt... This entire planet is sacred, yet you'd be hard pressed to see it with the current state of things. In the paraphrased words of Rafael Jesus Gonzales, we fucked Eden up, then had the gall to go sully the Heavens, as if there weren't enough ruin down here already... This whole planet is sacred, but at present it's sick with this plague called us, eating it hollow, sewing our rot, and in short, fucking this bitch up. That patch of "promised land" sand and gravel is no more deserving of our stewardship than some 4x4 cut of gardenslice in the folds of a dying Detroit, or any vacant lot rotting in the wastelands of West Oakland, and more, it's certainly no valid reason to kill people. I can accept the argument that human life is more "sacred" or "sacrosanct" than life in the lower echelons of the food chain hierarchy, simply because I was born on "Team People", and my empathy for my own wins out over my empathy for other varieties of life. I can also accept the argument that human beings are a parasitic viral problem attacking this pebble, and that we need to run our course sooner than later if the Earth is ever to have a decent shot at recovery. No need to explain that further; I hold that argument to be self evident. What I won't accept, what I can't accept, is any argument that posits one people as superior, more worthy, or more deserving of life and basic rights than another, or any "rights" for that matter, nor can I accept any argument that asserts any patch of Earth you can cut out this sphere as being any holier or more sacred than another, especially when said argument is used to justify hatred, military force, murder, and genocide. That being said, I do believe this Earth remembers its past in ways we don't fully understand, and that places are as diverse as people in that they are set apart by their histories and experiences, and the memories of both they carry forward, in their fabric, their intangibles, their being. Yet in terms of worth, spiritual or otherwise, this world is ubiquitously uniform, as are we. Fuck your religion, fuck your morals, fuck your memories, and fuck your world view if any are causing you to act otherwise. When God made you It was of sun ribbon Maíz And the infertile char Of Earth burnt To primer When God made you It was with hesitation For she knew old gods Long dead In you would rise Again When God made you She birthed cesarian Because when you broke flesh To flow It was feet first Hard labor See, God didn't make you She screamed And you echoed into body And being My Chocolate Valentine: A poem from a life removed, written upon request. Happy Vaginal Day.2/14/2014 The chocolate is soft Once a fist Turning from form To a fold Of slow rolling wave In the embrace of tongue And tooth The taste of her Comes through still A scent ripe With must and sweat And skin A memory like the stamp Of a first kiss That lips will not let go She is beside me Already enraptured In sleep and sueños Slim fingers curled Around mine As her eyes flit With dream And daylight It is now that I choose to tell her About herself Tell her how her smile Beats my heart into rhythms Of rain and rapture Every single time She smiles so hard her cheeks crease Or how when her fingers are not there To curl around mine Mine curl around shadows And slants of light Searching for hers In the still air dark Of 1:00 a.m. I choose now to whisper things in her ear I’ll never tell her again Hoping something in her Receives my words Maybe locks them away in a corner of her heart And that perhaps one day She will see a wave A curl of folded blue Slow rolling across ocean Like sound over sleep And she will know Without knowing how Or why That she is loved "Shan shui painting is a kind of painting which goes against the common definition of what a painting is. Shan shui painting refutes color, light and shadow and personal brush work. Shan shui painting is not an open window for the viewer's eye, it is an object for the viewer's mind. Shan shui painting is more like a vehicle of philosophy." The woman in the blue coat considered the painting before her. It was gray ink mostly, shot through with a tint of green, maybe, though that could be just an effect of the lighting above; it was dark in this corner of the museum. The paper was the color of dead grass, and the hills on the paper stretched away from the viewer. They were rendered in folds like a bunched together bedsheet, or corrugated metal when viewed close to its plane, and they were cut in two by a river running switchbacks towards the foreground. A few rows of Chinese characters marked the corner, something to do with the author’s name she assumed. And near the characters was a man, his head bowed, navigating twists in a thin dirt trail. "Shan shui." She looked to her left. A man was standing beside her, his eyes to the painting. She hadn’t heard him walk up, and he seemed not to notice her. "What was that?" "Shan shui." He raised his brow in acknowledgement of the painting. "It’s a style of art. It’s what you’re looking at." He kept his eyes on the subject at hand. She played coy. "And what exactly am I looking at?" "A landscape." "You go to school to learn all that?" He smiled. It was his turn to look coy. "A landscape that constitutes more than its parts would suggest. A landscape rendering all details within irrelevant." With this the man finally turned to face her, smiled, and gestured back toward the painting. "The lack of color, the ubiquitous pale in shading and tone, the frailty of man set against the very world that contains him, and the calm with which all this is expressed. It is all intentional. Through this screen everything within is made equal. Even man cannot stake out his claim. He saunters off in the corner, barely worth our attention at all, no more significant than the dirt path which he walks. Indeed, in shan shui he is far less significant than the path itself, for the path is essential to the form, and he is not. In shan shui we find all things in harmony, the majesty of nature balanced against the insignificance of the life therein." The woman was now smiling at him, though she herself hardly noticed. "Of course, all art is merely a projection, and the real truth about nature is there is no harmony, and there never has been. For in nature balance is not produced by some delicate union of opposites. In nature balance is forged through conflict, it is the product of extremes set in eternal opposition to one another. It is an idea that is only ever approximated, and never for long. The median of the pendulums swing. "And so it is with us, for as is the case with all things contained in nature, we reflect the natural way of things. So I ask you, in us does one find balance? Does one find anything close to moral equilibrium? Or harmony? No. One finds great evils, and then in the face of those evils great courage, a light for every darkness. But one is dependent upon the other, always. To see the good in things, contrast is required. To know virtue in this world is to know its enemy. We encompass the universe in what we express, and what grim expressions those include." The woman was silent. She had stopped smiling. The man walked away. |
AuthorRhymer of words. Speaker of sounds. Ancestral conduit. And cool as shit. Archives
March 2015
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