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I.
And my hair became too much

It overtook the walls
made its way into the office on the sixth floor
and then hung
like a dripping willow’s branches
over the desks

By the time they thought to find me
I’d already been wrapped up in a cocoon of brown hair  
indistinguishable from the walls
that was now
also covered in the thick strands of undulated hair

II.
everything and everyone became consumed.


III.
In hairy chrysalis, the scissors uselessly
hung on some poor frantic pair of hands
forced into pupa

IV.
It was on the third day that the streets surrounding the corporate buildings were once again
populated with people, that a young woman in heels swore she heard a
faint choral singing coming from the 5th or 6th floor of a dreary grey building.


V.
everything cocooned
everyone consumed
all in pupa

VI.
During metamorphosis, a caterpillar digests itself leaving only behind imaginal discs
that shape it’s adult body.  

everything becomes consumed.
4.2k · Mar 2017
Can’t a nice girl be human
I do not want the sainthood you assign to those
who have never let you down
I want the ***** gritty scabs that come from falling
off of pedestals and landing in the mud

I am in no need of your righteous tongue
I am in need of your caring shoulder  

of your love
of your grace moving through me as you kiss my thigh
3.6k · Aug 2018
Abandoned (dream poem. 1 )
I thought                                         you'd left us, long ago
desolate on a swing
                       rocking stale, dry grass and still air
                      
                      crossing
never quite                  the hurdle

                                                               ­                                                    lost

unaware
sweating youth in this humidity

I thought we'd never make it past the
rusty red and brown of weathered fences

                            like
              felt                        moun
   They                                  
                                                     tains

                                                               ­   Made of dirt
                                                                ­                       (guilt)
and an endless turmoiling scent, still fresh



I thought you'd forlorned us                  
h     e     a     v    y       r  a  i  n   and warm bodies
standing next to oxidized hoops
                                                          one adjacent to the other
The haze of the heat hard, but not impossible
to withstand                swaying like the gust of wind, swaying  
                                            the blazing sun and my open palms swaying




Why was it here                                         that it felt like you left us
                                                              ­                                              stumped,  
unaware,­
consuming  with no  
                                              idea of the Greater



2.


                                                W­ H A T was it about inner cities
And skin that would tan
Or resist the sun
   that made you  mutter murky words  


judgement
                   that made me hike a

                                  K
                       A
            E
P
that for so long made feel like a (lost) traveler
unable to come find my way   D O W N.

Still on a mountain top
Never quite crossing the hurdle.
That’s how you wanted me
A
     B
          A
                N
                     D  O N E D.

3.

But my tongue made sounds
copper pots and plastic measuring cups
became the pious  accompaniment
of a song sung inwardly
until it manifested
Words on lips
                            Lips willing to kiss the purple clouds made out of strange fruit and a high border walls over my hand and back

4. A Swimsuit and a pool that could cool
me
small children see the cicatrixes
      But I walk towards the water; I have long abandoned shame.
3.3k · Mar 2018
Question Poems
Question 1.
can you escape the words that so easily want to roll off your tongue
can you put them away
see them off on a ship

have them cross into the horizon and dissipate
under the burning red sun
of the east
Question 2.
Can you replace all letters of an alphabet
that easily taught, rolled off your tongue
can you put them in a shoe box,
seclude them in a corner of your new life,
where 80% of the time you are fine
Do you think they will cross too
cross the horizon, like the things you wish would
and then dissipate
Question 3.

Does the pollution amplify the heat, if so can the heat burn or melt old Polaroids
this is a writing experiment how close can you get to the space between the source and conception of a question my answer was to play with grammar usage asking questions that need no grammatical indication of their querying because i want the structure to more adequately reflect the state of mind i’m in while i ask these questions. obscurity. I do not know what I seek by inquiring, and so these questions do not know their own purpose, thus by not including a question mark the statements above never fulfill all the grammatical prerequisites of a question, the statement has yet to realize it is a question and just lingers somewhere in between.limbo. If you’ve made it this far, give feedback please. What else can I do to deconstruct the structure of a question? Do these above statements feel like they are real questions?
and they escaped the weight of darkness peering over their shoulders
where do these people go,
what belongings do they pack
is there a limit on the heaviness of ones’ soul
Can they bring love
as parting gift?
Hide it in their handkerchiefs, and then go
when he kisses me I sometimes crumble

I love him but not as much as I loved the one before him

when he kisses me it is joy delivered
and sorrow brimming
from the wet kiss
the other never pecked
softly over my lips


when he kisses me I want to forget
the love I held for the one before

When he kisses me it’s like a tectonic
plate of  sorrow meets a tectonic plate of joy
and the earth shakes
and I quake
and I crumble, crumble again and again
every time  he kisses me I know why earthquakes rumble
2.0k · Oct 2018
Kiln (must keep busy)
my hands are on automatic, pressing down on clay for three hours
then pinching plastic through wire for another three …creating and creating.
Coiling around the hurt & hiding it in a mount of clay  "the kiln will burn it” I say to myself
My misguided attempts at the time to bury my hurt; run from it. All that remains of that time in my life are short poems like this one.  c. 2015
1.9k · Jan 2019
Womxn to Womxn (why?)
you judged me
out of my own beauty
the same way you judged yourself
out of that dress
The need for more love and less judgement of sisters who aren’t like us. The more of a need to uplift one another. The importance of seeing  the brilliance in someone as it coexists with their imperfection. Therefore, I choose the concept of weight as an entry point. We judge one another just as viciously is we judge ourselves, not just because of weight, but because of gender identification, creed, ****** orientation, economic class, and more.
Wearing comfortable clothing is what I desire

And if that is a purple g-string with a pair of high rise low cut shorts
You best say "good morning"

And if that is a pair of bell bottom jeans that do not press tight
against my hips with a long sleeve pink sweater
You ought to say “good afternoon”

If I please sugar in my coffee or no
coffee but instead a warm swif of chamomile
tea you best hand me the cup and show
brotherly love to your sister

If in my womb a child grows or I decide
It does not grow
You ought to stand by me but you best
leave that choice to me
Roe vs. Wade making its way back into the court matters. It would mean a lessening of womxn’s rights in the U.S.

You may hold different opinion on this matter and on abortion. However, everyone’s life is different there is no one way life unfolds just look around you. The world and someone’s life does not follow a linear or predictable narrative. I believe with all my being that if we seek to control and choose what a woman can and cannot do with her body (something we do not do federally for men) we take away her choice, we lean away from neutrality, but in a deeper sense we in act violence upon those whose lives and thinking are unlike our own. So then the question becomes do we want to continue to treat one another this way? Do we really want peace and compassion? Even when it hits home and is uncomfortable and may push you to think beyond your own experience make room for it. Look at this world for what it is and open your heart with compassion for every human being who lives a life unlike yours.

I stand behind women having a choice to choose.. I stand behind Roe v. Wade.
1.6k · Feb 2017
There is a home
There has to be more, the more that takes you around the corner to the park
to the grocery store and to the bohemian hangout
the more that takes you around the world, to the highest cliffs

to the foreign currency exchange booth, to the flowers growing on the side of the road
the more that brings you to your hometown
to the tea cooling on your mother’s table
to wearing old house slippers
The more is for “the you”
who knows the "it" is built on that, which came before it
because the "more"
lives in the comfort of knowing
somewhere it has a home
(where it takes root)
Please tell me someone loves you well, so that I can take my small offering and burn it at the foot of a mountain,
instead of hiking it’s trail to deliver it into your palms.

I want to know you are so loved,
that it would be a poor gift
to give you my affection,
in comparison to what you’ve got.  

Let me head away from the shadow of the mount
having burnt it, with an urn in hand,
knowing it's her warmth that walks you
through the foliage
and the wilderness of your heart

a bond so deep that it strengthens you
with a better tenderness than that
which would rest
on the possibility of mine


Tell me you are well loved.
Maybe, this thing does not matter.
It feels like a current,
But maybe it’s just another stream
with the promise of leading to the sea
when it’s truly
just heading for a lake.

Maybe, I can watch the ducks paddle over the water
and the twigs float on by.
It could be that this is how you learn,
that your gut doesn’t have eyes.

But it could also be how you learn
that there are some things
no eyes can see.

Whether it be
for the worsening or for the bettering
you are floating down this river
an island in the water
it’s viscosity carrying
you, with your hands
at the side of your hips


where you’ll end up
grace cannot be too far
when you follow the flow
who knows where you’ll end up
maybe next to those ducks
or in the vast open sea
the woods are moist with the fever of fear
suckling the after thoughts of speech
spit out without regard
for the crickets venturing to sing
or the widening of the streams
strong with neglect of the rusting branches touching tip to tip

(but) this is what we are, a forest
1.2k · Feb 2017
Kamikaze Years
she cried on a day that should have been celebratory
and I did not have words

she danced an ode written to cumbia
she danced it out with grace
with verbs so fine  
you knew she held the present
at every sway
she did not have words

we walked to food joint next to the bar
rolled out the English language
in exchange for sustenance
“what are words?”

I picked up our food
drunkenly shook out some lingo
and the grey-haired man on the other side of the counter
took a deep breath and stayed silent
“Are words needed ?”

the Kamikaze shots and the tequila made our tongues soft
and our upper palates dry
pouring only thirst, into our youth  

and there,
eyes soaked in meaning
in a circus of incertitude,
the cold wind turned divine flurried our hair

*“we do not have words.”
1.1k · Oct 2018
You are an Empty Room
when places rid themselves of people they become empty
and when a person rids themselves of the people who fill them up      
they become the empty rooms,
rooms that at some point someone wanders into
and lets out a scream without ever hearing one back.
And if they do stand there long enough, all they really do is hear the fading echo of their own scream slowly dissipating into the void.
looking back at snippets of writing from some years ago. c. 2015
Blossom with love and courage into the spring,
that is unalike the one before it, but none the less
full of growth and the sweet scent
of possibilities

Blossom in the light of positivity
for you have carried too much sadness
and cradled too much fear. Aren’t you tired?

Bloom
like all things on earth bloom
Flower into your next life, naturally
unfold

Fluorescence is your call
tenderly guiding you wild flora
into the fauna where you belong
You too are that, which came from earth
and grows from light

Winter beckons a spring,
and it’s your turn wild flora.
1.0k · May 2019
Acceptance is a celebration
People keep saying
“You should fight for your love “
But it still feels so unnatural to me
Such a disconnected thing to utter
so archaic this notion of fighting
as if I held the key
to universal order

Why would I aspire to such arrogant a feat

You must understand that when I think of love
I am engulfed with joy and warmth
that I cannot fathom war
so stop trying to send me into battle
I do not want to join the Calvary

Instead, I am placing my heavy shield,
weapons
and armament down
among the flora springing into life

‘Tis is a celebration in disguise watching him
walk away faithfully into the thicket,
eyes closed but in the direction of his true inward self

Now, why would I fight that
there were dandelions on the grass
dear girl, the smell of an Alcatraz flower is fresh on my linen
but sometimes I look back
and wonder if this city wears a too thick a coat
while it struts pantless over the sidewalks of
Macarther Park

there is liturgy mumbled, a woman waving her hands in the air–
Sunday school prayers being learned in Spanish
tri-folded pamphlets on the floor
and gum over the pavement blackened by the cooperative march
of immigrant workers speaking in all tongues and carrying
on their backs, the tower of babel while halted at a red light

heavy cargo trucks speeding down Alameda Street
wearing down the road and the patience of drivers
tents multiplied, and R.V's lining the streets  
the old buildings being torn down and neighboring apartments  getting face-lifts  
"beautification"
costs
more than headshots–
more than a rhinoplasty–
more than the real estate of DTLA–
when you see two kids come out of a tent with their school backpacks on
–you begin to grasp the price

Is this what Keats meant: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever "
even while destitute
the neon pink on their bags seemed like another gift of spring
and their perseverance the paragon of  a psalm of life
1.0k · Mar 2018
Reposo
Me sente sobre la mesa
todo el lugar es lindo
la mente esta en calma
y todo el lugar es lindo
las vias silencias
los ninos llorrando callados
el ruido de la registradora
y el cambio cambiando de manos
es tranquilamente mudo
al igual que la quietud
que ejerce paz sobre mi mente
896 · Sep 2020
Trust.(mutual trust)
Trust
can I trust you?

Again,
can I trust you ?

Can I trust you will treat me with respect?
Can I trust you?  

But really can I trust myself ?
...if I cannot trust you to treat me with respect ?

Trust, great leaps of courage on the road to trust
                                 ...
I see no other way to live deeply then to take great leaps of trust

Can you trust me ?
Can we trust each other ?

on this path that bends in so many directions great leaps of trust await

open hands with the intent to trust remain
gentle and willing to try
Trying to map out my thoughts as I try to renew trust

I find it is requiring I decide to let go of past hurt.
Every time the subway lights go off
I close my eyes and listen to my cart speeding over the rails
What was it that you said, about the velocity of life ?
The one that carries the immigrant, the bible belt strapped and the intermittent traveler through the woven passage of a history they can see in the molding of the land.

2. I can’t quite remember
why I live life so fast,
but I feel (it)
the hill and the turning of the tracks

3. The trains are quite quiet here,
and few people talk.
It’s as though the lights were still off .
1.
It felt like crossing      
all things cross, right?

2.
It has been many years since we have walked through that tunnel
and into this land
where the hands of spirits became the wings of ancestors over us
and the quiet inner gust became an orator of truth  

Truthteller could you tell me again my name
They have given me so many on the northern journey,
disguised me to be one of the multiple
flickering pixels on a television screen

eyes darker than their own
but who has darker eyes

3.
She is the barefoot daughter of the Pachamama
womxn of many tongues
womxn whose tongue was not cut off
so you hear her sing when the sun comes up
and sway with the blades of grass
onward in the direction of the voices and the wind
and all the things that cry and laugh out loud  

4.
They made you cross, too
and at the same time
But they made you forget
about the birds,
the wind,
your name- our name
and the alphabet
5.
silence is the alphabet used to speak truth  

6.
They made you forget your name.
Ask them your name as you look up at the sky
cloudy or clear
as  children lay silently next to demarcation lines
housed in steel bars
gloomy and lost
ask and listen
to be humbled by your name  

7.
The spirits call again
can you hear them now?

back through the tunnel of innocence,
they whisper your name.
I ran like a wolf. Always trying to keep up. “Wait!” my aunts would scream, but I was off before they could stop me. The tiny dark haired girl, among a pack of five young boys. They would always utter “can you? ”. I’d ball up my tiny fists and say “yes”. Scraped knees, ****** fingernails, sprained ankles, and those bruised greens and yellows suspended on my back like floating clouds, although painful to the touch, none were enough to stop me. I was always competing. Always trying to make them eat their words  “You can’t do it; you are a girl”.


Now that we’re older, I’m inclined to ask them how those words tasted.
I do not have any sisters. I grew playing with my cousins and my brother. All of them were boys. I tried to touch upon my experience as the only girl growing up.
803 · May 2019
Codex Painter
codex painter
have your hands rusted
is this world not  as vivid
as the one centuries ago
the one
that bore the same tint,
rich in intent to serve,
to devotedly work
head inclined
over the flaming light
and under the celestial stars

pictograms
are what I now reach for
from the vessels tucked behind my ears
from the smell of copper
and the tastes of adobe pots,
simmering with memories,
to the corneas anchoring my vision

because I must have a vision
the "it" becomes what we intend
and I intend "it"

give me your codices
unfold the fibers of the agave plant
and let me paint again
this world
larger
this lifetime kinder
for I have always been a scribe and
a painter
and my heart rejoices in service
to an existence expanding
to meet itself in the eyes of all
who I dare draw
Work as in the work you are put on this earth to do. Working towards your unfolding not the capitalistic definition associated with work.
776 · Mar 2020
Dangling
I sit with my feet dangling into a circle
whose edge I rest on
as if it were a window sill.

From here the earth looks ancient.
It’s pull mothered by the curvature
of spacetime.
The spring blossoms curving
when they fall.

Our fate floating out there: intangible–
outside this circle where my toes abide
Our fate floating in us: tangible–
The place in which my torso resides

The debate seems fresh unlike the sagely soil. My limbs alive –life giving life– emerging like the pistil from a bellflower
unconcerned with philosophy.
It is raining   and it is Christmas in L.A
the home       of paramount pictures  and the home        of skid row

Each drop multiples         heavy
like the narratives             given
to justify                             why
some deserve to be           out on the streets

on day like this when the water pours and seeps into their tents   bridges cannot hide or cover                         our collective apathy                           (shame) as we cross  
into the next decade    “i am not to blame
if he/ she / they            don’t have a home
what a shame.”
672 · Mar 2021
Softening
If you tender world can soften
I can soften
into this fragile living and dying existence

I can soften when I reach the edges of myself and meet my limit and my doubts
I can soften when my hands want to grasp tomorrow or reach back towards the past

I can soften and sit with everything within me

We can soften to our humanity
we can soften into our beauty
we can soften into our imperfection
and become more loving
simply by meeting the edges and softening
softening
softening and taking one step over the water

If you can soften
I can soften
into this

I can soften when I reach the curb
and meet my floating sorrow at the surface of the lake
I can soften when my hands want clench and have them remain open
I can soften and sit with everything inside  me

We can soften to our warm trust
we can soften into the best version of ourselves
we can soften into our the knowing nothing is certain  
and become more loving
simply by meeting the edges and softening
softening
softening and taking another step over the water and softening
When we reach our very limit our every edge there is where we soften, with whatever that edge is
643 · Apr 2019
It is what it is
all the while I will love you because I’ve never been good at stringing the little locket heart into my chest. It’s always just dangled in my hand clumsily. People always tell me “kid you gotta hide that. Don’t you know where you are.”and i want to laugh. And say “ I’m in the jungle baby”, proceed to sing the rest of that song, and not let them get me down. Cause **** the *******.

It is what it is, the sadness, but with it
also the love
so,
why suffer.

little locket in hand and the nearness of the you, jazz standards floating through my head,
are enough.

It is what it is.
I’m in Love with you. Thousands of Motown songs and R&B 2019 top charting singles running, forming hills in my mind
mounting
so ever slowly, but continuously that everytime I walk past one of those hills, I fail to recognize it.
They’re becoming mountains

They are what they are,
as this is what it is.
615 · Jan 2021
.
.
It is about timing
and the willingness to act
I had the willingness but never the timing

Half of it is grace and the other is your own hand
I could never put into words until now
the warm sensation of menstrual blood trickling down my hand
or the smell of dried blood stuck to public hair
and how every time I walked passed the butchers or deli department at the local grocery store
I could recognize the smell of blood dripping from tissue left on white sheets displaying the cuts of meat
sheets the same color as the toilet paper I use every month
to examine the clumps of the ****** that flow downwards
to be born life-less much like a flank stake behind the glass case
****** stuff
We awoke to specks of white ash over our cars
the cloudy grey sky bore no sun just its heat
and the ocean breeze that cooled in my younger years had become futile
California burned
and although L.A  city did not
it was indeed a table that received a mantle of pollution
If you walk down the hallway of all your sorrow Watch on each passing door a projector display the whirling colors of the hands bearing gifts and shackles, shaking trees under frightening storms and caskets of people and things seemingly lost. If down this corridor you continue, I promise you will get to the very end where only a final door in front of the corridor remains open where the temperature suits your skin and life still exists lighter and freer than where you were before. This gift I am sure you will receive if you walk through that corridor of your sorrow and you step through that final door
523 · Jun 2021
Untitled
Who knows what tomorrow’s flowers will be like
495 · May 2019
The Heart of A Dog
mom, you raised a girl who is not afraid to die, a girl that still thinks she can climb every mountain, just because you let her climb the fridge, the cabinets and the roof of her house.

you raised a ******* the road

in van traveling up the west coast with a man who longed to be free

to not wear shoes and not be bothered by the wind
brushing the rest of populace's feet

Mom you let your child run free with the dogs. Let her think she, too had four legs and could love someone as unconditionally as they do.
My dad did not want to settle down in one place. He bought a van and set off around the west coast with my mother and I. I spent the first years of my life on the road. My earliest friends were dogs. I always felt like dogs and their unconditional love was something to really stop and appreciate. This poem comes from the faded remembering of my childhood and the feelings of wonder and the questions “how big is our capacity to love?” “ what is the essence of our capacity to love“
I still think it’s unconditional.
480 · Mar 2020
Brillantina
Her hand moves in a back and forth manner
as if she were playing the trombone
But she's really just pulling my greñas
spreading more Brillantina
to make her baby's hair sparkle    
even though its color is nowhere near that of brass
474 · Jun 2019
He aquí que te encuentro
Hoy se habré el portal
y te siento cerca
Las hojas se cristalizan
Bajó la luz

La rara concepcion del tiempo se

deshace y se desliza como pequeños listones naranja
sobre los párpados
De esta materialidad

Tomando en mano cada átomo
Y uniendose a el


Te encuentro en tu casa
Dentro de tu jardin
Regando tus plantas con tu manguera larga
flor de piedra
Constantly I must take off the hairpins, the embroidered shirts, and the lint skirts. I must sit on the wooden stool and unbraid my hair, then proceed to cut it short. I must be able to live without them: the conditioning
–their idea of womanhood(genderhood)

                   Every once in while I must banish them: to know
I can live without them; they are not me ( all those  ideas, all that heavy jewelry)
—I am free; I do not weigh
attempt to re-remind myself of shedding that which I have been conditioned to accept especially when it makes me feel as though I must give up my power to create my own life.
445 · Jul 2020
Unclaimed (Hart Island)
Off the coast of the Bronx
at the western end of Long Island
before ships landed: the home of the Siwanoy tribe
once the training ground of the 31st U.S Colored Infantry Regiment
according to records, a prisoner of war camp in 1864
later referred to as  "Potter's Field" or "City Cemetery"
then a quarantine station for yellow fever patients
as well as a women's psychiatric hospital & a tubercularium
on the west side of the islands
between an empty 4-acre space lived Solomon Riley's vision of black coney island during Jim Crow  
after the stay and departure of Pheonix house
Hart Island
now is the final resting ground for New York City's covid-19 victims
whose family could not or did not hire a private funeral director and so they were labeled "unclaimed"
Tragically, over 150,000 people have lost their lives and continue losing them.
I saw a picture of a mass grave and traced its location to New York City's Hart Island.  
I wanted to research what victims of Covid-19 were being buried at Hart Island in New York City's mass graves. I also wanted to explore the location's history in tandem.
Overall, it just breaks my heart that federal negligence has contributed to the loss of life. A first world nation with one of its wealthiest cities burying bodies in a mass grave; this is the state of the United States of America. I wish it weren't so.

El cuero arde
cómo arde el cartón,
como arde el presente, en los dos hemisferios

Hay lugares donde los pies protestan,
donde la impuntualidad es menos sutil  
y se disfraza con vernáculas y un buen traje  

Lugares donde hablan tu lengua
y donde hablan las mías
mientras se sirven un plato de comida antes
de despedirse y ir por su día

Donde se enfrían los pies,
y coreo un rio rojo
Donde se escurre la vida sagrada
en un palomar de discordia

2.
Ahí nadie vuela
yo quisiera decirles que de ese recinto
ninguna persona toma vuelo

Sin falta de acuerdo,
nadie vuela
y cielo azul,
azul de ahí se ve lejos

De ahí veo las manos de los viejos levantadas hacia cielo
en balanceo
y me quiero ir.

Camino hacia mi madre.
<<de aquí nadie vuela>> le susurro a ella  
 en el oído
pero ella levanta sus manos más alto
y me ignora

Me trago mi nudo de garganta,
y decido ir me,
pues de aquí no e de volar

3.
El creer es necesario-fe
cómo es necesario
el hacer-acción

Dos hemisferios, en un solo mundo
y tú plenitude de vida
acatan la flor de esperanza en mi corazón.

Se que todo vuela, cuando viene el viento del cambió.
Pienso en el cambio de actitud de la cual nuestra generación debe y tiene que tomar para reinventar nuestro mundo colectivo. Es fácil hablar de esto usando abstracciones, más en nuestro día a día es difícil explicarle a alguien quien tuviese la fortuna de haber nacido en un país rico, que deben conservar agua, reusar lo más que se pueda ...que deben en corto cambiar sus vidas. Pero lo más difícil es hacerle a algunos usar  sus manos, resistir lo ser pasivos.

Hay muchos que temen lo que será de nuestro futuro, pero yo veo los bellos niños de todas partes del mundo, inventando nuevas telas, avanzando tecnologías, y dándole a la vida un buen arranqué. Ha ellos les debemos cuidar este mundo, pues son sus herederos.
When you squint your eyes
you help the light properly reach the fovea
as those who are to come to
appear amongst the foggy mist in the vicinity of your mind
descendants, bleary figures
almost close enough to touch
   their outlines refracting
from the surface of this wet and wild time
–a mirage in this heat–
you wonder
whether the way you live in this world
is an illusion 
or if their silhouettes are the phantasmagorias

the weight of their lives, our overconsumption
(is this why we are dying?)

...they do not have a countenance
or a name by which to call them into this teeming orb  
your womb, our earth –can it not hold them?
Brown is the color you get when you mix all the others together
So they never know where I am from

I am the resident brown person.
The closest skin that tans
that’s who they think I must be

Your children play with modeling clay, play doh, and with different colored squishy slime.

When you put them to bed, take as many colors as you can from their play box and knead them together and you’ll understand why my skin is brown.

And maybe you won’t have to ask where I am from two, three or four times only to still refuse what is obvious
So obvious they forgot to put it in history books

When you enslave, colonize, migrate
You mix
The coalescence and coagulation of blood into human skin
This  should be of no surprise
you mix
Brown children on the back of white mothers, brown children on the backs of black fathers
Brown children tied to the curve of brown womyn’s backs

So do you understand why America is a brown womxn, too?
You can’t stay there forever
your heart ruptures and breaks open
your life becomes magma cooling
new earth being created from a violent
or effusive explosion but new soil nonetheless
427 · Dec 2021
You loosen my bones
Mid stride my insides
rattle and my smaller and larger
intestine begins to soften

I walk; a bag of bones
clacking in winter
417 · Mar 2022
Tender things
I wobble, sail, simmer under the sun and swing in the park
watching human flowers of the earth bloom alongside tender grass
Your beauty was not invented your beauty was given

Given at birth when you opened your eyes
present before your name was lined up in any mind
a truth that is what your beauty is
407 · Mar 2021
Someday
Someday you gotta take a wild chance on you
Stop  looking at only the negative
make neurological pathways to condition in you the positive
everyone deserve a life that can be loving, light and beautiful
despite the loss, the uncertainty and the impermanence

Today, or tomorrow,
or whenever you are ready take a wild chance on you
404 · Jul 2021
Untitled
How tender are they the young and the old
Am I tender, too ?

It is so hard to see what’s so close to us sometimes
be today’s love child, look
out the window or put down
the glass screens, all seconds yearn
for you, moan for sweet attention
and you yearn for every single
one of them, too
so deep is your yearning
that you hush it with reproach
like you would a neighbor’s dog
barking outside

But it’s your dog
so it’s right outside your window
and the years of wishing
your were someone else
have not neutered
your own desire to return
to the arms of the present
instead you too begin to bark
your desire unyielding
388 · Apr 2021
I ask
Can you grow
can you expand and use your past as the bricks laid down to build you
and can I meet you again then
because I do not want the past
“ can you embrace growth and change”
can you embrace humanness
let it be a long arc bending towards
beauty, joy and depth
387 · Jan 2019
Soltar raíces (Dar fruto)
Voy a soltar frutos
raíces amasadas en mi cráneo
como azúcar querrás frotar tu dedo
y lamer su polvo dulce,
blanco granulado

en mi maceta crecen triángulos de sombras
llenas de cuadrada soledad
en su tierra querrás meter
y embarrar tu dedo
después sin pensarlo te lo acercarás
y te lo meterás a la boca
y ahí en tu lengua
también mis raíces crecerán
Dibujando mé
hasta que en ti quede yo
y en mi termines tu
Soltando raíces
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