You swirl in a sweeping of leaves up to the heavens, and I stand again at your grave
your songs spin and join the dried foliage, I hear you sing my name and the flowers you gave me, now dry, spin in air too and so does my grandfather’s songs at your window, my uncle’s guitar before he passed, the tuning  of my cousin’s bass and the strumming of my brother guitar melt into the canvas of today’s fall skies. And just when I feel so close to surrendering, I feel all these dried parts of myself begin to lift.

I will not pucker up my lips and try to kiss you
I will deliver poetry over your tongue and ask you how it tastes
I will be what I am with my fragrance
eternally unrivaled as is yours, theirs and everyone’s else’s
our uniqueness solidified at birth

I dream of wolves resting over the grass. Wolves two times my size, together, gentle, resting/ calm like my childhood dog blackie/muzzle over a kingdom of green fescue/they are creatures of god

I dream I am there next to them, my hand stroking their fur/ for some reason I am not afraid/ when  hiking in the wild I was taught to stay away from animals/ some how I am not afraid/ there is wild wolf in my heart/ I am not afraid

Tomo los retoños de primavera y los siembro en mi hombro
tomo las hojas que nacen pequeñas
apunto de volverse sobra sobre mi
y las cultivo al lado de mi pecho abierto
tomo todo lo bello que se asoma
en cada minuto dentro del día
y con ello procedo a lo que es
y a lo que aun día será

correct all the mistyped words
with correction tape
bestow upon me the click of the roller as you turn it
with volition
yield me the appropriate inches
of mental space -margins
as I type a new year of life away on an eternal canvas
let me place them as numbers over a birthday cake
so that all the thoughts are eaten by the white space over  a rainbow sprinkled cake

You are in mine
too
So much so
that I quit trying to get you out
of the veins
that flow like rivers
throughout the entirety of me

I pushed myself, I listen to the little voice and I shed limitations
painful and uncomfortable but I learn and I grow and that this what this life is for

For the first time I feel uprooted
and I want to cling to the earth
I want to belong to this body

I want to search for my place of belonging
I am done hustling for affection

I want true partnerships
I do not want the fear anymore
the fear of losing you or anyone
because I came too late, was born too late
or said the wrong thing

...
Baby I deserve some real sincere
****, **** me all night, cry with me when I’m not doing well, walk in peace with me,wow lets work together to heal that, you got your life I got mine kinda love

I just want a shot at the real thing
not at illusions or romanticized stuff
I want my place of belonging only if it wants me back
...

I am going back to art and words
into creating expansive landscapes. I have the need to grow me like a lovely cactus in this desert I find myself in.


...

I reach for this very human brokenness to hold it in my arms and nurse it. I reach for the true beauty of life and for the me that can be
...
I close my eyes and see a kind hearted woman, devoted to many things, always learning always growing

I see this body boldly aged and I can my hair long and white
an elder
full of wisdom and my soul light as a feather

I am here to hold you my uncertain sorrow, hold you my jubilant cries while holding with my other palm the shrieks of excitement. I am here to walk alongside you as you walk back from a dead end road you thought would go somewhere. I am here in the rain–unwilling to abandon you when you spit out words half peace & half misguided renewals of sadness. I am here for the sentimental-girlish **** others refer to, to lift your chin up and say “baby girl you got this”. I am here to squirm and dance with you when no one else will. I am here to hold you. I am here. Here, to break bread with you. Here to drink of the same cup and comb your hair when you’re drunk.

la forma en la cual te decapitan
es normalizada igual que el esplendor
del sol, a cual le llaman cosa cotidiana

la forman en la cual callas sin saberlo
es naranja siendo pelada
mas no la muerdes la regalas

la forma en la cual una pandemia te desboca
es dentista jalando muela
y despues hasta le tenes que pagar

la formal la cual la estacion apgujeong no te facina
es la misma forma por la cual hollywood y vine tampoco

trabajadores en rumbo hacia todas direcciones para
no morrir de hambre

It is an honor to hold your hand in grief
as it is to hold mine while I weep

It is a privilege to see the books you selected on your bookshelf by hand as it is an honor see the titles that tilt on the shelves of mine

You are sacred and so am I

It is an honor to hear you sing in the morning hours and it is an honor to hear me sing to the falling rain

It is a privilege to enter the sanctuary of your mind and soul- the one you have watered with love, care and delicacy as it is an privilege to be allowed to enter the sanctuary of my mind and soul


You are sacred and so am I

Thoughts: I observed ducks in the lake comfortable in the cold their plumage  warming them. I thought about what my plumage may be. If the plumage were a metaphor what is it a metaphor for. Is it wisdom, is it skill, is it a learned capacity? I pondered  and then I just laugh because my mind is conditioned to find patterns and metaphors that somehow I momentary lost the point… I don’t have to know. I can just sit here and observe & be present.

2. Thoughts: … ☁️

I see clearly
who I am in the mirror
where I excel and what I lack
I writhed and I cried
and burned
and ran like a wolf alone in the forest
awoke next to a lake
fur still damp
but to the water I turned my gaze
and I could finally recognize who I was

humbled by the moon and its giving light
I stood there shivering and out of my mouth spilled the courage to howl

and the wind accepted my offering and carried it off

This is where I start
I see my humaneness,
my everythingness, my interbeing
and so I your blurry figure comes into focus
and you are just another human

the kind who stand in front mirrors
writhe, cry, burn,are reborn and
run like a wolf
until you howl out too
to the greater in humbleness





I am back to my being
and you can call me by my real name
the one we share

Tu corazón lleva fuego en su interior
raíces precolombinas, gitanas, negras  mixtas para que la  llama arda
como solo ella arde cuanto se prendió
durante la alba de tu nacer para darnos
tu sol

I could hold a foam sword towards you
but only from a distance must it
look real, this bluff of mine–

unzipping my mouth like a coin pouch
to reveal its teeth would do little
no words would change into a charge of bulls

a faithful distance
for the harmonious well being of an  aging
heart that needs a steady home that I cannot provide, this bluff of mine is played –

adorned with this old regalia of indifference, so heavy it stops me from running to where you are, forgive me—

every time I grow silent and distant it’s a bluff not on you but on me who loves you. The bluff is one me—

throbs of pain that materialize from the air
i hold my chest,

i try to imagine two warm hands embracing
the heavy iron stakes of sorrow that pierce you and then me

am I bee
be am I
Bee I am
beeee
I am
am I to believe
that I am a bee

I love you with the compassion, the deepness of self forgiveness, and the  jovial self belief that I love myself with.

I love you knowing you are nowhere near perfect,but knowing this about you
just sits right with me

and your will, will be yours to make
and not mine to restrict or try to change

We talk about our cultures and I tell them I come from very expressive and outwardly loving ones

that I am hugged and kissed on the head by my older cousins male or female
that even now immersed in a different culture
when I come to consider someone a really good friend, I want to hug them and kiss them on the cheek
that I tone myself back so much!

that I was taught to be loving and direct

That I want to dance when I hear some music! Dang! Like I really, really, really wanna groove

That I struggle with perception here
because instinctively I feel:
that to not be warm
feels like someone is intentionally
being cold: a sign of indifference

and to not be direct
is intentional disrespect :
seen as if you are wasting someone’s time on purpose by beating around the bush

that I always have to stretch myself to try and understand
that I must give up my notions of what is okay
and give up what something as simple as outward displays of affection or directness mean

It means pulling myself at the seams and seeing what remains underneath all I was taught beneath the performance dance these cultures schooled me in
their religions, their power systems, their moral codes, their values

what is underneath is truly me
just as human as any other
same same in every part of town
and in every corner of the world

“You can love the whole world” floats from up to the surface from the ocean in my chest

I can love the whole world within
me–the love affair commences
in the  limitless heart there we are introduced
so eager, so light and meaningful such small fleeting things are like a smile, the sound of steps and the tips of another’s  cold hands warming when you cusp them to try and hold them although they are like water destined to change and move along without you

I dram your hair was buzzed and over the back of your head a shaved crown with a yellow outline. You are well; my hope is that you are well.

que tierna
la alas de
un pajarito

que de su  ser
trajo a otro ser

liviana es
su despejar

el viento
a las alas
carga

el viento
mi amor
levanta hacia
mi viejo padre

Go find people who will talk to you on a bridge, who will meet you in vulnerability. Who will not leave you in silence under a street lamp. Go surround yourself with those who will ask “what ails you?”
You deserve to find respect in the way someone considers you. Find those who are sure of you, who can see you are a charm not a thorn. Folks who make you feel like you belong; folks that choose you. Do not spend your life crying over those who could not hold you. Forgive them and forgive yourself for asking the naked for a coat. It may be that you were naked, too. Hold nothing against anyone just be on your merry way, see where other roses grow and what spring looks like when winter releases its grip over your heart. You cannot stay in the past, no matter how sweet or how troubling it seems. You are here on this “x”. Take heart and go find people who like you –wish kindness, love and joy for all those around them. Go, go bravely, go quietly into life.

I feel this ball of energy entering me
something has come
it has already arrived within me
announced itself
but I cannot yet see it here
in the materials world
but it is deep and makes my heart race

Be an opening flower
the touch of  warm rain water over your  petals releasing
the smell of your lilies

Your smile-sudden and blooming with laughter,
                                                                ­                          I see.

Tasting rain water with my tongue,
                                                         ­                                 I understand

Hear.                                                ­                                 Clarity. Clearly

The flowers is on my bare chest and I become we. And we delight in each other  and in the rain and in the turning of the earth’s soil and in the material dance of form. The way that the sun makes us both perk up let’s  me know we both recognize where warmth is and where it is not.

The Sierra Nevada is a dwelling
for the old limbless sages
rooted firmly into the ground  
three thousand years slid off their annual needles
like rainwater in front of them I disappear into the fog; there together 
   We meet like old lovers while outside
  the others cut tree trunks and ask for more lumber
     And of me demand  my hands and their labor
They want our lives to be spent for them but in the mist alone we know that the clearest things can be hazy amongst but not lost in the madness of our cultural weather

And it radiates from your eyes
this joy and you become fuller
and your eyes girl
they become so much more beautiful not because you are right but because you are kind

Every poem I read today
made me weep
spoken word and hip hop coalesced
brought the concrete streets and grit
and pure relentless of yesterday
pushing it through my lacrimal sac

It is good to travel alone, to venture into my being
no people to distract me
no vision of tomorrow to blind me
nothing but
me
and everything I neglected to feel together in one room

my body naked in the morning rising
to shower, rinse and pat dry
my headscarf over my wet hair
the peeling of an orange
the boiling water inside the kettle
my willingness to face the day

I send photographs to my mother
she calls me her butterfly, her bird
her brave girl
on a wall of my old room she
had painted “fly “

and I think back to being five years old holding onto her leg
scared of letting go on the first day of preschool
anxious to swim in the ocean for the first time
shaking at the thought of rock climbing

I thinking back to her smiling
telling me to go and be free
this her greatest gift in this world bundled in words of encouragement often too harsh
she used to get mad, that at first I would not take it
but I know I treasure it
her toughness, her zest, the courage it takes a mother to open her palms

my nakedness to feel, the nabi flying
                    my obsequió is
meu vida pra ser quem sou

I have lifted the mug to quench my own thirst. I content,—— a middle line, silence, full as I always was find myself beautiful and find you divine. I need no other reason but this deep love of ours here on the spin-off rock to smile.

I had a dream that I found you on the Subway, leaning on a rail guard by the door slouched you said our loved had ended with such sweetness in your eyes that I cupped your left cheek with my hands and smiled

When the doors slide open, I proceeded to put my arm around you and guide you off as you drunkenly made your way out. I knew I would still love you
just not in the same way. If before you had pierced me like a needle, now you were one of the threads that had stitched me. And so I kept smiling

You stretch your hand and this time you will grasp not because your hand is long  but because the line of love that like yarn was made of prayer, of hope, of courage to bring about change by others is strong enough to hold your body as it high lines. over the canyon. You prepare because you know this will take all your focus, all your wisdom, all your agility, and your discipline and all your human heart. Others may shy away but you will not

60's and 70's Latin American rock
EL extraño del pelo largo
Spinetta
Pedro Aznar
Hay tanto y quiero escucharlo todo

4 hours = about 4 albums

In elementary school the kids who had  lice in their hair were sent home. During recess, you’d hear it through the small sneakered  grapevine while playing on the blacktop that “so & so go lice” –choruses of “ew” would erupt from the girls and some of the boys. In a few days the “so & sos” would return with a freshly shaved head.

As far I knew, lice were akin to fairies in their size and exclusivity. I’d never seen a louse or a fairy.
                              ...

There were many stray cats on our block.  When I was old enough to have a decent daily allowance I would save each dollar within my backpack’s side zipper bag until it had enough money to buy cat food in bulk.

I would get home three hours before my mom and pops, so I’d take my sweet time feeding the stray cats in the backyard. I got so confident that my parents would never catch me doing the deed that I bought two large silver cat bowls.
                            ...
My parents never caught me feeding the five stray cats. However, they did catch all the lice the cats left in the back yard.

I remember my mom running into the house screaming “ ¡hay pulgas!”

                              ...
On a Saturday, my parents made me help them spray the entire backyard. To teach me a lesson they said.
                                 ...
They were tiny and fast; they had that “now you see me, now you don’t” kind of speed. I wanted to catch them, but every time I tried I failed. Until I swatted at my arm, and squished one through pure luck did I know what a louse looked like.

I want to write about the way the stars swallowed with matter the emptiness
and how the moons began to orbit the planets and how the planets became
silent floating dreamers
witnessing a red giant’s combustion
the ardent way a life burns bright in the midst of such a universe as our
all inevitably traveling towards extinguishment

It is today I want to write about all the possible impossibles that brought me here
I sitting on an orbiting rock
my chest rising and falling with bones just below flesh and arteries pumping rivers of red blood through me

Había una mujer que le hablaba a lá Luna. Tan encantada estaba con la luz de la luna, que un día extendió sus manos hacia ella y le clavó sus pulgares.

Al tenerla en sus manos la mujer abrazo a la luna cerca de su pecho y le susurro con cariño “tu aluzas las más oscuras de mis noches”

You seed your war in my home over my tongue
and I refuse it
ten napkins, 11,12, 13, and 14 cannot suffice
to clean policies or gunmen
or blood on the cement of Asian seniors pushed
to the ground because their ancestors were
not white. Those napkins cannot wipe off or wrap around the feet of mother and child, and when their bus arrives from TX & AZ
to DC seeking asylum
it cannot clean the dirt of free labor and a system of incarceration for the poor as its substitute from the spine of an American history book
You seed war in the only home I have ever known
but I plant words of  remembrance and accept the past with its flower of responsibility
In the only home I have ever known, this earth, I plow &
toil for the possibility of a dignified life for all tender creatures under the sun I cannot refuse to the manuring, the irrigation and the weeding for someone else did the soil preparation and the sowing and they will do the harvesting and storing

What we were yesterday falls away today
the mascara dripping under the shower head
the introduction to said mascara, the time our a best friend brushed our lashes
not one by three times claiming somehow that would make them nicer

owning things
Being “__” because it matters

Matter for what reason?

all the yesterday’s fall away no image
worthy of being clung to

all can fall away
and what remains below is what can never go

When you come so far to be left
   with no response for months, years until

It feels like an eternal dance floor where hope has propelled
  you to stand at the periphery watching as they dances with another

When you come so far to be the last kid chosen for teams
  only to be told that to include you would be one too many (odd you)

It feels uneven, but not uneventful how your heart                breaks
  and still the blame is never split like you wish it were
       (some for you, some for them, some for time and some for life’s  required modules) 

the candy during recess is not  split fairly  
                     When you come so far fairness dissolves
                     off of  the countenance of the other kids as they begin
                      to grab what they can

And you wonder if that is what they did to you
                   grabbed what they could and left
                   or if that is what they think of you
                    
It feels like a tragedy or a terrible comedy cast,
                  staged and off broadway now
                  maybe they feel the same

The dancer who does not want to dance under the disco ball and the ones that want to dance but are standing around waiting might just feel the same.

I chuckled in a starbucks
a capitalistic touchstone of experience
because my old high school boyfriend
my then long haired metal-head is an environmental scientist
what is more heavy metal than saving the environment
as quintessential as a green logo-ed mermaid is to visual culture
so is the aching guilt of living now...slowly killing this earth  
At least when we talked about making the world a better place,
he was telling truth

keep your feet moving
and look above at the full moon
it shines like your eyes
but it cannot see itself
how beautifully suspended
it is in time, full always
just sometimes it’s real face hidden
in the shadows

I live and die by         poetry

      I live hundreds of lives            notebooks
of lives
     I die 100’s of times       in the silence 
of a spiral
                       And I am reborn    
To this wheel of                            samsara    
           
           ­      with every turn of the page

I want silence.
I want the sounds of the wind and the leaves to be the only music I hear. I want my friends’ voices to be the light posts I stand under.

I want like all summer wishes to turn into Fall. A deciduous.

Life is here in the dust that falls over my masked face
It is here on the small damaged earth
you handed back to me as if you had simply borrowed some cheap 99 cent rubber ball
I ask why it’s so *****
you answer “ “
It’s surface soiled but  in it less flowers bloom

I ask you how you will mend it
Tell me your rides here your carpooling with your mom’s friends

that you will try to help but that I
Should figure it out

(But you borrowed from me all those who came before you)

I stand on the dirt arena, the matadors are my thoughts and bulls are feelings. Both strong and assertive. I watch them and breathe.

I am strong
I am brave
I am carrying my bright light
and my life calls to me
it does not matter how much you resist change or want to put me down or get in my way

I am not in opposition of life nor in opposition of  you; everything inside of me flows like water and I listen for the direction of the stream
perhaps you are not listening
maybe you are too caught up in other things
in that case my dear girl joy is a compass and your heart sees roads your mind cannot fathom

I am not afraid
I am trusting of this world
I am well able and I do not need to cling anymore to anything in desperation
for whatever I need
to get through
I have got deep in my soul so whatever happens know you stand facing a womyn who is full and wholly
And I would always offer you my hand even after you have trespassed
I am passed the black and white notions of life, of books, and dogma, of not searching inside of me, of shutting out my own inner wisdom to conform to outer guides
I only listen my guardians when they whisper through flickering lights
you cannot bring me down
there is not down here
where my being abides

I am alive and there is warmth inside my chest
The sun again makes its trajectory over the sky into yours
Standing at the door of dreamworld
Half anchored,  eyes closing
I begin to understand that the warmth in my chest also rises

In the sprawl, we both call home

the city sings in colors
what it couldn’t speak before

I hear the crooning,
the two soft syllables
every stranger finds in your name
every time you exchange a “Hello”
and I am immediately back
right next to you

I dreamed I carried you close to death
dying
over my shoulder
and your  breath so weak

I asked you where you like to go
“ to the place we met” you could not speak
“It’s too far, right” I answered my own question then I awoke in pit of sorrow
in a pool of my strength the next step was over the floor into waking life

Then, I knew that I accepted
I would be there when you died
,if you like me to, if I was still alive


I would not promise a life together
the arrogance of such promises
are mythologies of the old world
dying
of old humans wishes to exceed even life itself, control what on lips of heaven
neither angels can affirm

but i knew if you were willing and if you are able
I will join you on that day