Don't be scared to sneeze in MATH105
Blow these numbers off the page, so I can finally have an excuse to
Blow off some time with you

I want to memorize what that sneeze sounds like, unique to the individual
Each sound varies upon sneezers voice,
allergies, voice box, larynx, even personality
If that's all true, I bet even you, sneeze as **** as a *******!

The only thing that I want more wet and slimey than the inside of your elbow,
Is the way we make love
"Oh baby, that's it!
Sneeze for me! Sneeze harder!
Sneezed like you've never sneezed
for a man before and then sneeze
harder!"

Don't EVER hold a sneeze back!
You're not only killing brain cells
But killing me as well!
I want to see what kind of tornados
you can throw when a dust storm
gets at you
What demons are you hiding,
not letting Christ expel

Don't be ashamed!
Are you scared that just you're sneeze
Will create tsunami waves of attention
If so! I'm buying a front row ticket wearing
nothing but arm floaties and a rain coat

If you get sick, kiss me with your breathe
And well get over this cold- feet together

I want to know your sneeze so when we
Are cooking dinner, you can be half way through inhale
And I'll have a tissue and the words
"Bless you"
Already trotting outta my mouth

I want to be the blessed one
To be within hearing distance
Be able to bless you back  
See you come outta your shell for .237 seconds
There to catch the science of your anatomy jumping off the cliff of your nose

I want to be in the bookstore,
Reading super hero graphic novels
And hear you in your boredom two floors up at Starbucks, sneeze,
And be able to say
"YES! THATS MY MAN!!"
You hear that one Peter Parker?
Try to dodge your spidey-sense around that one!
That's a sneeze that'd make the phone booth go inside Clark Kent!

We'll have two kids, named
Gesundheit and Salud
The cat's name will be Ah-Choo
Unless you're allergic to cats
Then scratch the kids, we'll have
A cat zoo! So I can hear the symphony
Of your nostrils on the daily

If you think this poem is gross
Wait tell you see the way I sneeze
When I'm thinking of you

There’s a bus station inside of me

My emotions are always on time

But my actions are arriving later than ever

I’m the punk kid in the corner of the 23

Trying to escape home

When really, 
I’m the elderly lady, nervously riding the 26

Trying to find her way back home.

Home.

We wander aimlessly around university boulevard

Pretending like we are college students

Knees shaking like my 3rd grade hands when 
Dad taught me how to play poker
Growing up is a gamble
Except you have nothing to bet,

But everything to lose

College is a card game,
but missing some of the 52’s

And the 21’s,
barely 18’s

The first time I got blindingly drunk

We were all just 18, just graduated

and we were drinking like it was 
going to be our last drinks
We said “I love you”

Like we were about to be sent to war

Society, war field

Knowledge, machine guns
We said “I love you” 

Like we were ghost

We never were so able

to see right through each other like we did that night
We grew up hearing the scary stories

Of our battered haunted houses

"Love."

It wasn’t the tequila talking

But courage we found in fear

Fear that our mother’s would 

**** us if she knew what we were doing
     *
growing up*

We stay up late in the dorms

spewing our dreams out of reality

I learned at a lecture once

That when galaxies form, 

Masses spew out of control 

Smashing into each other

until millions years later, 

They find their orbit

We’re becoming ourselves in the most

violent of ways

Smashing into things until 
we get it right

One time, I saw a toddler on the bus

Peeling off his own scab

In all his gore and glory

He held it up in pride, 
"Look ma!"
its amazing, that any age

We find new ways to make ourselves bleed

Just to make sure we’re still human

I write poems for kids
That too often get asked

“are you a boy, or a girl”

Because they are the only ones who
Will understand the physical rush
Of empowerment versus discouragement
In their guts

The question that verifies
You have finally broken gender norms
Unhuman.
Floating in unearthly genderless celestial bodies

“are you a boy, or a girl”

Only to hit the ground faster than falling stars
When told

“you better ******* start acting like it”

I write poems for kids
Who have a bird cage for ribs
And fish for a heart
Raised on its ability to fly

Look kid, you gotta learn how to swim away
Because you’ll be question by bird keepers
Until the day your veins are able to run upstream

You’ll leave the closet to only join the zoo
So enjoy the field trips
And the bears, and the otters
And learn to question the birds and the bees
It’s okay to only want birds on birds, bees on bees

It’s okay to want to try ****.
And it’s okay to want to stay as far away as possible
To think about *** at sixteen and keep that sweet composure

One day the reflection on the glass isn’t going to match
The second grade smile behind it

Frame yourself however you may choose
It’s okay to have purple hair
We all make mistakes
Don't feel guilty for being too scared to tell your mother

Your whole life, people have been trying to build you in the wrong direction
They aren’t going to understand what it feels like
To simply just wear
Eyeliner,
I understand, it’s war paint

Or the kind of questions you’ll get all afternoon
“are you a boy, or a girl”

Your identity is not polarized
Gender is a spectrum, not a just *****
There’s shades between the seven colors I fit in

Recognize you’ll be lonely eight days of the week
There’s no one like you at home or at school or work
So step out of frames,
Look at bigger pictures

Every hallway is your catwalk, every shoe
Can be your empire state stiletto
Every ****, ******, slur is compliment to the human anarchy inside your bones

Your human anatomy matched with the way your mind things
Is one of the greatest forms of activism
And if you ever go through an emo phase,
Be the baddest goth child you can be!

I write poems for kids
That fall between “boy and girl”
I write poems that I wish I heard as a kid
To tell kids to keep fighting
Even though the war is not yet won
There’s victory in every battle you tired

Liberation looks like teenagers mapping their voices in 10 minutes of silence
Liberation is being free from the day’s struggles and tying them down to paper
I’ve seen liberation happen
Ink flowing on paper like they were flowing blood from their fingertips

If you’re so angry
Write a poem
If you’ve ever been cheated out
Write a poem
If you’ve ever been lied to without the courtesy of it being done behind your back
Write a poem
Write every gut wrenching, self-deprecating, thought on paper
Perform self-surgery to remove the weight of world from the bones in your shoulders

By writing a poem

If they’ve never understood what is was like to go to school every day lacking self-worth
If they’ve never understood what it was like to go to school
Where adults didn’t trust you, officers looked down on you
“Get to class” – My only purpose in life was to get to class
“Sorry teacher.  I didn’t do my homework because being at home was too much work already.”
Then write a poem

For the broken desks and spirits
Crumbling ceilings and facades
Holes in the floor and education system
That our school forgets to brag about
Write a poem.

To correct every materialistic, tech savvy, online, suit and tie, next big thing,
Kind of ******* lie our school feeds us
Liberate yourself by writing a poem

For the principal that has no idea what happens in the classroom
Liberate him
For the students who don't know what doesn’t happen with administration
Liberate them

Write a poem
Because if you fail, then will anybody notice
Your silent shouts knocking on deaf ears




Write a (love) poem
About how this school became your four year long affair
Five days a week. Even though you had your battles
You’re going to miss this kind of relationship when it’s gone
Liberate this kind of community

Write a poem for the soles of the feet of boys and girls
Who dance on broken bottles
Copper glass shards
Exoskeletons of alcoholics
Scattered in a playground like tombstones in a graveyard
Write a poem for the broken bottles your community got used to
Liberate your community

If you’ve ever been inspired here then write a poem
To inspire others to loosen the wrinkles in the joints in their fingers
Crinkle out the cracks in their wrist
Get those palms to tell their own stories

Write a poem
That will make them raise their arms and shake
Chains of oppression off their lungs to get them o
Breathe
Liberate them

Write a poem that would make the roots of you ancestry shake their leaves
Liberate your roots

Liberate yourself – make them listen
Liberate them – make yourself listen

Liberate the 9th grade wannabe’s, drop out clichés, teenage mothers,
Clueless administrators, kids feeling tied down to Tucson,
Teachers lacking faith in change
Boys and girls thinking they are forever
Silenced
Liberate those you are forever
Silent

Liberate yourself
Write a poem

I’m always pen in hand to write the sins my lovers have committed
But I more than ever, shy away from paper
At the mention of the tragedies I’ve written
The hearts I have broken
The stories I’m ashamed to write

Some nights I spend sleeping
Other nights I’ll spend resting my head down on a keyboard
Drowning in updates and refreshing pages
Trying to find reasons for being up
so **** late
Lately, these nights that I worked a long eight hour shift
Waiting to escape retail in hopes
My friends aren’t busy, wanting to retell some stories
The nights my friends hop restaurant to restaurant

“We have no place to go"


We’ve been riding these desert streets for hours
Resurfacing our stories to heal our wounds
Or maybe our laughter only masks it
And we like to think it’s both

You can ride these streets as fast as you like, trying to forget,
but tonight,


we write
we ride
we eat
we share

tonight, the moon plays catch-up with us, it’s desert wonderers
the sun, tonight she’ll rest
tonight, the roadrunner
walked
crossed the street with a lizard in its mouth
looked me in the eye and swallowed it
The desert bird didn’t serve its name’s purpose
We’ve realized that sometimes, society, doesn’t serve it’s intentions


but when so
"we have no place to go"
We’ll turn parking lots into neighborhoods
Cars into homes, with kickbacks and house parties
Turn songs into poems
Become poetry ourselves
Become trilogies of our most battered loved lives
Find excuses for where the stars lie
And sometimes we’ll swear they lie in our ex’s eyes
And we’ll become what we don’t want to be in the dark

vulnerable


walking roadrunners


poets who don’t write

but in that moment, were just teenagers


"with no place to go"


We swear this summer is ours,
That growing up doesn’t have to be synonymous with change
That human beings aren’t equivalent to seasons
That poems actually can be never ending
if only we have the courage to
write the beginning

That Denny’s will always be a hotspot
Cafe’s are temporary
Dollar Menu’s are forever
We’re everything but hungry

Only starving
For inspiration in a wasteland
Unquenchable thirst for dreams of doing
something in empty parking lots
Trying to fill voids.

Tonight,
We replace our heartbreaks with these nights
The nights we walk across roads
Unknowing the other side, with lizards halfway down our throats

Tonight
We write, without looking both ways


~

I come from metallic bunk beds
from American Express debt
and Visa Master Card envelopes

I am from run down two bedroom apartments,
   trying to contain a higher number of people
   than it had walls

small. battered.
it felt like a field

I am from the palo verdé

From the hissing noises from cicadas outside
bronze screen door, they ring all summer long

summer never ends here

I am from large late night texas hold em games on Christmas night

from yelling, insecurities, laughter

from nostalgia

from teenager high school romances

Patrick. Susanne.

I am from divorce and cousins living airplanes away

I am from “don’t jump on that”
                “don’t touch that”
                “don’t run like that”
        from “I don’t feel like going to the hospital today”

I come from that awkward phase when my parents like country music
to when my dad tells me stories when he used to listen to Biggie

"are you okay laddie"

I come from Saturday Sabbath
I still don’t know what grandma believes in
but she believes in me

I come from Germany. My mother sailed oceans avoiding war.
I come from the land. My father witness oceans sailing to him start wars.

from sweet tea to bitter coffee

from the time I pulled out my brothers front teeth in a game of tug of war

from the only pictures hanging in the hallway outside of what used to be my room.
what was my room.

I am from Saturday night drive thrus

cruising south Tucson

creating a place worth coming from
where words drift off page, and family anchors it.