my dear tender eyes
the smallest things are the greatest things
disguised by nothing
their beauty standing on its own and like truth
it can only be recognized
so my dear tender eyes take my hand and can you feel we are made of that same tenderness that tilts towards love

Tender I sit at the side of the road
this lane that house
the many people that live in tents or sleeping bags in subway stations
the youthfulness
the way I cannot close this hatch
the way I cry when I see someone else cry

the way I say no and hold my ground even when they tell me
I must not be honest “speak like a politician” the ways in which they find me wild are the ways in which I refuse to refuse my own heart and soul

I sit tender at the side of the road

I wobble, sail, simmer under the sun and swing in the park
watching human flowers of the earth bloom alongside tender grass

Thank all the trees whose leaves
reach outwards
thank all the clouds above
for their seamless passage through
the sky  
and thank all the small ants
that venture over the gravel

I sink my finger into your skin
and my words into your soil
and ask that you simply slow down
  enough to see the blossoms over me  
   How they rest in equal quantity
within the fleshy tenderness of my human life
   our shared pulse can be felt by putting your hand
over your own heart...
    that is us together, that is us
      –life

Look at the very edges of yourself

the wall studs that have always been sturdy
from corner stud to corner stud you have been built well               you are made to fit

each end joist, brace and girder right where they must be
you are harmony and beauty just as you are

Look at yourself every edge constructed with purpose       and the space left in
between purposeful, too

The jazz became part extraordinary
swinging into my ears
leveling my mood and the uneven picture frames of the past hanging within my mind needing of proper straightening of care and of being carefully hung to show my immense gratitude for what was

he started to pretend with me too
a handshake delivered
as if his eyes had never met
the irises of mine

how many people had I ever seen him shake hands with? did he know
one well enough to feign a smile

he made me think of smiles
as masks. I tried to smile
and then I could not

the allure of numbness hung
close to me. I felt in presence of a lost
sincerity or that of an absent friend. I waved
while he sat in his car
with his child and his wife
And so I sent my wishes
for his good fortune asking

that they too multiply with every rotation
of car’s wheels
that the child be fed
that the roof be sturdy
that love bind well the frame of the automobile on the highway on their way home

I hand you a flower and you open your palm and place a coal stone

I smile
after many years your flowers were pressed
died and combined
made dark but I do not just see one
I see the bouquet you gave
(The years and the darkness of soil mixed with all the gentle things in your heart)

They grip at me  
Two fists snuck into an envelope of soft words
I get “Adjust” instead of its harsher
commanding counterpart “change”
(“comprise”  is in absence in this conversation)

But I see my grandmother smiling
And great grandmother dancing
And all the womxn that have made me
appear from behind the mesquite
emerging from the thick wilderness of time
to transcend
to bear naked their wisdom and  grant me their heart

Their dance swirls within me
Their smile leaps
reaching through flesh
like a ray being emitted from my inner cove
To materialize over my face

And I can sit calmly and confidently
Smile And say “no”
“You cannot dance with me.
Go!”

We all falter and that is okay
and i understand sometimes it’s just a matter of whose turn is it now

Love involves due overs
it is expansive and forgiving enough

but when we falter we must offer someone else the dignity of acknowledging the suffering we have intentionally or unconsciously caused them by saying  “I am sorry I hurt you”

there is no fault in faltering
instead in never saying I am sorry
never offering sorrow the dignity of its name–of naming it

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

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)

How dear this living is to me
I wake and whisper in its ear “good morning dear”

How dear, how dear
oh how dearly I do love
this living

the people, the flowers, my heart renewed by our shared existence
how great this living that broke the eternal solitude of the cosmos

we keep ourselves company in different forms
the space between two stars overcome with the embrace of our arms

I write every circling thought so that it leaves me and exits
becomes its own kingdom of possibility  released like stream from a natural hot spring into the ether of the all
tethered for all time until life brings it forth
with birth
what I do is liberate
and the rest remains in gestation in the belly of life

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

the first time I hiked through the forest at night I was frightened And then, I just decided i could not remain scared
I trusted the bark was bark
and if I stretched my hands out  I could touch the solidness of a tree
and I trusted that the ground was ground firm beneath my feet that it would
support me and not suddenly give way
opening like a trap door
I trusted that my ears would hear
I trusted
so now I must trust that the heart
can feel ( what is truly real)

I get up and make sure that I take a short walk. Any direction is the correct direction.

And all the feelings I have wanted to vanquish because they  seemed crippling, selfish, guilty and sorrowful walk like little children next to me

I pick them up and carry them
in my arms
we make our way around the neighborhood
holding them I can see they just are
like the trees above and the ground below
they just are
and they need to be honored
with a sacred prayer, with a ceremony, with a story of creation
a Popol Vuh

a pen is not present
to take out my phone and type, type , type

“The first four feelings...”

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.

The heart bows
to the sweetness that emerges
from below
and we smile

The mountain’s soil is now soft
enough foliage has fallen
on the forest floor to make it
a thick springy mat
the delicate sorrel grows
its pink flowers
over the duff layer
where all that breaks down offers
nutrients

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.

The hinge that holds the door
does not creak this is evidence enough that I should be grateful

but I take deep breathe and it’s as if I inhale the world pain and so I creak
 even if the hinge on the door does not

I carried the grocery bags to my car,
while the divinity of my spirit carried me
within its bag swinging me back and forth, through a parking lot that was no less divine than the snot running down the nose of the little boy being pushed on a cart while his mother made her way into the store.

1.why
The breathe we exhale gives route to the carbon  that travels from atmosphere to organisms circling the earth

your breath is the breathe of the massive red pine tree next to you

You inhale while the mindeulle around you take from the earth’s soil what was laid to rest and exhale

there are dandelions all over the world that slight death just by breathing out

2. The embrace
The way in which everything touches
everything make me think that we breathe together across time

your breath is the breath of your mother and your mother’s mother

The way that everything touches everything makes me think that I am already holding you

(each breath slighting time)

1.
The car speeds past the pedestrians walking across the street
When did life become unwelcomed?

The public schools around the Banc of California Stadium are low in funding. Kids in hoodies with old text books and underpaid teachers make their way through the heavy traffic on buses and in cars.

When did the prosperity of life become selective?

The grass, the trees, the flowers, bloom through the cement cracks.And an inner city scholar, bound for college likens this image to their life.

when did creating unnecessary struggles for life become useful?

2.
An older woman with a grey sweatshirt and three bags is sitting on the steps of a gym while the security guard tells her “you cannot be here” . While a few feet from her, a young man taking a lunch break finishes his sandwich.

“When did life become unwelcomed”  I hear the pigeons above her sing, as they try to perch over the clear spikes
their song nesting deep within my mind

There is a lake in my eyes that fill
and dries with seasons of life.

I cannot predict when its shoreline
will recede out of joy or sorrow.

I simply know there is a lake.

perhaps the body needed rest
and much of the streets needed silence

as the churning of the great metropolis would not halt
if this was not the case

as we see living as the art of productivity in lieu of the art of leisure

factory smoke subsiding and even the sky is in languor

I let go of the many thoughts that walk into my realm of mind,
today is still here and so am I
I grow joyful just to feel the wind pick up
and this calmness surge from the steady breeze as presence cloaks me and sways me like the leaves

The marigolds sing, and although I cannot reach out and touch you—I can still find you.
You are the warmth and the light and the luminosity of love that sticks to me and transforms life. Yes, the marigolds do sing. I can defend this because I know—
I know you and you and you
your eyes stare back at me, your thin hair I inherit, your beauty marks reflect in  the same position as mine. I know that the marigolds do sing.

( the marigolds sing “Here I am. Here.”  And there I find you, again)

“One day at time”
I say to myself
when my eyes redden
and my body feels exhausted
and the bathroom mirror is too close
and reveals me
to myself

There many rivers to be in awe of
wide,life giving, enough to satiate  

I must look at the rivers near me
and know they are just as healing as any other just as birthing and comforting as my most beloved rivers

When I miss you
I close my eyes
and there you are

There are times when you choose
and there are times when things choose you

There are days when I want to say hello
send something I have read and share the way words or music sit on a sheet or laid  down on a track
when I want to open my rib cage and smile at you at the entrance of my door
And say “this is who I am”
  “come in”
A gift to behold you and a gift to be beheld

<<tweet tweet tweet>> their fingers chirp like birds
graceless in their singing
and unconscious of the harm they have awakened with their narrow syrinx of thought

Reckless with their egos
and responsible for birthing a nature full of disregard towards all that lives and lies below the trees of green; an ecosystem born into an inseparable union
–a synthesis of flags, of mashes and of micro biomes teeming with life

The color of red will stand out among all the germinating leaves, as we wake up to escalations of war and the trampling of safety
those birds will continue to <<tweet tweet tweet>>

For they forget that to sit at the crown of a tree does not mean they wear a crown

Those who wear the boots down low
are those who will hike through the forest and traverse through the night below the boughs where these birds perch

I will finally hang Rich’s “Final Notations.” above my door

It will be a 8.3 x 11.7 rectangle holding space for my courage and my will
to not close or shrink from life

it will substitute as an answer to all the question I want to ask you
because I will not ask you for how long
you will hold me at peace in bed or for how long
you will get up and meditate with me over the cold linoleum floor in  the morning, I will not dare and ask you for the sun and
the moon or for the things that bloom eternal

I will just behold you there folding the laundry with me, there cooking next me while holding up a spoonful of soup to my mouth,   
“there,there” as I cry and tell you all my sorrows

I will hold out my two palms towards you in the same manner as I do when we start to dance over my grey turquoise carpet

I will open not just my hands but my heart so that you can come in, so that you can hold me as the sun begins its morning trek, so that you can sit so close to me during morning mediation, that I cannot help but sync my breath with yours, so that if you find the moon or the sun on your way to me
you can lovingly show up with them in your eyes or tucked in the width of your smile and I will be present enough, enough
will recognize them
so that if your love springs eternal you can show me and I will believe you

I will hang her poem up because I believe
I still believe
even though it has not been simple
I believe enough so to welcome you and let you show me who you are and how you can love me
I will hang it needing no guarantees
I will hang as the answer to all my questions

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)

My brother picks up the phone and speaks slowly to me. My arms and legs tingle and begin to buckle beneath me, I am simply grateful I am seated in a car on my way home. “You did good” he says. “Today was a test run. You learned your limitations”. I tell him I wanted a book. So I tried to go to the bookstore but ran out energy. He tells me, I overdid myself not because of the book but because upon exiting the bookstore I joined a march around the block to protest g e n o c i d e. The timing was perfect. I thought it as a sign to join I mention. He laughs while holding his phone almost 6,000 miles away, asserting that I should take care of my human needs and rights especially after my injuries. I laugh again. He is right. I laugh some more but I begin to cry. The book I bought was by bell hooks.

In the preface, she describes how turning away from love in our society “risks moving into a wilderness of spirit” one from which it would be hard to find our way home. Is that what I am witnessing, I think of the picket signs. I think of the lovelessness war connotes.

Have we lost our love of this world?

Are we so afraid and so broken-hearted that we merely theorize about love? But will not stretch our open palms towards it? What does it mean if collectively we cannot conceive of love’s open palm or the love of others to makes us smile at a stranger or cook a dish for friend.  
I like a  falcon in her gyre of words spin in their warning. When suddenly, I hear my brother’s  voice and I am on the ground watching the falcon turn in gyre, his voice soft like when we were kids. I return to his voice, I return to the comfort of sibling love. Each block of joy we have built since children and I cherish the placement of each one.

I think, the world is not too far gone. It is like this. Waking up to the sudden voice of love that will breathe life. Suddenly able to see clearly with awareness where we stand and where our hearts have stood and will stand until the end of time—in love.

There is meaning in the way your eyelids swiftly carry your delicate lashes
meaning in how they part
to reveal the beams of a new day

There is meaning in your breathe
and in its’ rhythm
meaning in the way it allows you to take a hold of wind and transform it into life as you exhale

There is always meaning

Meaning in a smile
Meaning in the appreciation of a warm sweater
Meaning in the trees
and in their leaves that seem godly
and profoundly tied to you
just as you walk underneath them
the scenery becomes meaningful to me

There is no bridge you’ll cross that will be clean

there is no being that does not create
and you cannot forfeit the cold for only the warmth
or only the warmth with the absence of cold

you can not deny what you are
do not spend your whole life
pushing away your humanness
hold it once and for all
do not spend your whole life THINKING something is wrong with you
hold your self, sit in yourself
tomorrow does not exist

There is no need to put yourself in harms way anymore
no need to try and figure out what you can say to make it better for someone else’s comfort
no need to always try
and try
admire the flower that grows in winter
the same way you would admire the one that flourished in spring

There is no need to churn the wind or try and turn morning light into thick butter

No need for truculent mirages of the internal dialogue to command the noon

breaking into the present with all your heavy layers of guardedness
will not suffice for tranquillity and true amity

You came like a lightning bolt
quick and parting the rumbling  skies

if I had let my sorrow drown me I would of surely missed you standing there lighting up part of sky

you are indeed one of the gifts of remaining painfully open, lovingly open, open and touching life– touching your face in the middle of night

something kinder and gentler has finally come my way and I can see it in your electric smile which does not go over me
I see your glow and soon I have no doubt you strike the land

you are across the street
and so am i. we are walking
in the same direction. the sky is dimming preparing its arms for the dark lull in
which only stars sing.

the people sauntering
around us are their own celestial bodies detached from the outside world
in their mind, inside their screens– far, far away.

we pass them on the street towards
the same place light years from one another wondering if I tilted my phone and aimed it’s reflection into their eyes if they’d receive, if the speed of light can carry my message.

let these hours pass and let them drift off
I ache to come closer
but I sit here like a duck waiting
for this world & its bureaucratic pile of paperwork
I teeter between excitement and longing

if lonesome has ever been a scent
it's the one I wear tonight

I laugh the way the earth giggles when it’s sure that
storms come in and out of the atmospheric frame at their due time

I laugh in joy that at least I still got enough soul to wake me up

That I got tenacity, and freshness of  lilies
to keep me

Words of self awareness are like harpoons

that hit the places that are already wounded

                From those wounds blood still flowed but now as the second sharp point penetrates

It becomes clear that it is there what we must begin to heal

It’s in the small moments you being to steal my heart, scooping it with your hands as if you have known well what it’s like to have an ***** decompose, return to soil, recycled to nourish once again this earth

It’s in the small moments when you play out 1966 salsa albums, Ray Barretto, Robert Roena that homesick in Jamwon-**** near the station in our tiny home, that I the dust begin to rise

that my heart, my being just as immense as all of life, mundane and earthly dances in our small kitchen. how much I love that in your hands you hold me and I don’t sieve through; I get thicker.