Fernando Antonio Montejano

Fernando Antonio Montejano Apr 2020

National Poetry Month, Day 1: You Are Clutter

It's not enough to take the world inside of you and turn it into something different.

There are
small holes in the fabric of your reality.

Cut open by little pieces of glass you
refuse to pick up

The clutter builds
You are clutter

Somehow it's not enough to melt it down and turn it into jewelry. No one would buy it,

and you'd still be you anyway.

Fernando Antonio Montejano Sep 2019

Relapse

I'm standing in a small living room, dead center. My family and even some people I don't know, all proud Mexican people, stand around me.

I don't know why, but this memory is blurry and filled with static.

Some buzzing, angry voice cuts my ears. The sound a sharp, electric squeal. It hurts less as I get used to it, but I've been used to it. My ears tune the squeal and I know this sound. My uncle maybe. To be honest I can't remember.

My mind drifts off.

I blink in the light from the projector. Words flash across a sterile screen, something about an opioid overdose. First aid training presentation. I sit in a chair that's too small for me. My hips feel bruised.

Someone in class answers a question but I'm barely paying any mind. I can't stop thinking about drugs. I read the words in our follow along study guide earlier and now I can't get it out of my head...my head.

The hum turns into a low rumble.

I glance over to where it's coming from, the corner of a ****** apartment, the rumble creeps through the wall until it hits the sliding door to the balcony. Lightning bolt. I'm tripping acid somewhere I used to live.

I know I'm not there though. Just more flashbacks. Just more memories of things that feel good.

The phone rings.

I'm in my car, my cousin hesitates through the phone. My grandpa has cancer. I don't know how to feel because I've been avoiding him. I try to feign distress. Maybe make him think I'm not a terrible person for not knowing if I'm supposed to care…

I know I feel something. My stomach feels uneasy, like it always does. Except right now it feels uneasy like it usually doesn't. I tell him I need to hang up. I do. But it feels like a lie. I am self centered.

I am quiet.

The living room full of brown skin and brown eyes, red spit. They yell at me. My uncle's make fun of me for being ashamed of my skin. My last name is Montejano, but today my thirteen year old self has disowned my family. I'm tired of being called immigrant at school.

My cousins are solace, peace. I'm sure one of them told, but they pretend they care and some of them mean it. I am the bully in my family, I see them and I wonder if I even deserve my brown skin.

The memory sort of fades as I listen to the talking in front of me. Projector playing a slideshow. Things I should be writing, things I know. My right index finger is cut by a glass I'm washing in the sink.

The wound is large. I can see loose tissue while I wash it out. We find duct tape and some paper towels from the burgers we had last night.

I snort xanax. I'm outside.

Someone's playing guitar, I'm looking at the ceiling. It's just a memory but it feels so good.

My grandpa is in the driver's seat of a semi truck. We are passing a massive golden spire surrounded by trees. Somewhere near Maine or Virginia. As I try to remember the place we were, his face fades. His black hair is grey. And I don't remember it.

We're sleeping at a truck stop where he warns me not to open the doors at night. I don't sleep.

I step out of my dad's pick up truck a week later and it's the first time I experience perspective shifts, his truck isn't as big as my grandpas.

This is the first time I realise how small I am.

I'm pulling into a parking space as I get home from work. I can't remember how I got here.

#memories #addiction #ptsd #cancer #grandpa #mexican #mentalillness #drugs #depression #xanax

Fernando Antonio Montejano Nov 2018

Suspended In A Sunbeam

We dont get to choose how to exist on this rock. The sun cuts through us day by day as we sit alongside rapists and child molesters. As we hold hands with dictators and overlords.
Not everyone, but someone here today used to be something they arent proud of. Some of us are still that now.

I used to be a drug addict, now I weave light through brain cells and create images with sound.

I know what it means to be space now,
To be the ever expanding hands of my molester, scrambling for reincarnation.

To be white noise trying to regain control of the loose memories.

Those of us that fight the slow gnawing can not remember a day that isn't filled with the synaptic static of leftover memories. The **** that backed the toilet up.

I know what it's like to be the edge of the universe, to kiss the thin veneer of darkness as light becomes new to us.

I know what it's like.

But I wish I didnt.

I wish that memories could be pieced together, that like plastic surgery I could find a doctor with enough moral ambiguity in their heart who will take all the best shattered fragments of my childhood and turn them into the stain glass windows on a church.

And I don't even believe in that god.

“what god do you mean?!” My elders scream with contention, more worried that I may believe in something new than that I've lost my faith at all.

And I find myself asking as well…
With no recourse or reason or real answer in sight…

What god do I mean?

Carl Sagan said we all live here. On this mote of dust suspended in a sun beam. That we've all, from peasant to supreme leader, existed right here on this planet. Thousands of generations of us fighting to tip the balance of the universe in our favor.

So What god do I mean?...

What god looked out to all of us lowly mortals and saw our tears watering the crops?
What god was so moved by our small speck and us, the tiny motes of dust, that inhabit it's freckles?

Only my notebook, and it's pages sputtering whispers in to the wind.

As we all stood around it's dying corpse muttering passages from dead poets, hoping desperately to revive the past...I got my answer.

Fernando Antonio Montejano May 2018

A Little Bird Told Me

I watched you die today
And I cant stop thinking about how lucky you are

I draw lines from my bad decisions to my broken dreams and connect dots that remind me

Im my own problem.

A little bird slipped into my dream last night and reminded me how much I want to die.

Enough that the last thing I want to do is

live.

Fernando Antonio Montejano May 2018

Snorting Stars

The stars find themselves in my eyeline so often, and I reach for them, for other worlds outside of my atmosphere but I feel like Im always being pulled back into the worthlessness of dirt. ****** into the ground and suffocated by all my precious addictions.

I havent been able to find myself in the stars lately though...My memories are encased in the soft lining of all the different drugs ive done. Nostalgia for an era of pleasure that only hid pain in a closet until it became my boogeyman, kicking doors down and gouging my dreams out through my eyes.

Even blind, I find myself licking the memories like wounds, not hoping theyll heal but swiping at the idea of getting that feeling again. Feeling euphoria, feeling starlight crawling under my skin like paranoid cockroaches.

Somehow therapy made me want it more. My tongue pierces through dirt and worms, licks the faces of child molesters, searches the placid layers for a just a crumb...just one more hit.

In the past, I used drugs to see more. To shout so loud I could crack the thin layer of glass the clouds slide on, to watch them fall into me as the stars came into view again…

But See me now, here on this plateau of remembrance, mourning the feeling of being free from responsibility. So lost in the ether of pure being that the world could only be fog outside of my window. And its here...in the stark burning shimmer of bountiful light, the sun hugging me through the fog, its here where I realized how my addictions held me.

With my eyes clasped in darkness, seeing not stars, but sunshine breaking through holes in a thin reality. One id drenched myself in, one that fit better for me than staring into the eyes of the past.

Ive finally let the sun kiss me...and in the days since my eyes have been opened, I saw stars. They look like the sound of guitar strings plucked just right. The reverberations of light filling my eyeline, singing hope from my toes to my fingertips as I reach out to hold them.

#addiction #drugs #ptsd #therapy #depression #nostalgia #the #past

Fernando Antonio Montejano May 2018

Lightning

I woke up last night to a flash of thunder. The sound of lightning trickling down my bedroom windows, casting shadows as cover for the bugs that crawl over my brain.

In the cascading boom of nature that came crashing through my room, I caught a glimpse of the rain swimming through the air. And for a moment I thought I could swim too.

I thought that for once I could let go of my nightmares, that as the sky gasped in awe I could succumb to the overwhelming power of chaos and unclench my fingers, white-knuckle gripped to the horrors that comfort me.

Then the storm passed.

In the distance I felt a low murmur, not even a rumble anymore as the superheated air exploded in the clouds above me. Even though every boom rattled the skin from my bones, I felt empty.

The thunder flashed in the distance as long slow bolts of lightning traced themselves from existence into memory. I couldn't sleep the rest of that night.

Each distant roar from the mouth of God themself. A reminder to me of the demons that couldn't be shaken from me even in God's wake.

So I sit and wonder if the evil lurking inside of me even can be afraid of God. If the mistakes I made choose not to hide from the almighty because there is no dominion over sins, only sinners.

#ptsd

Fernando Antonio Montejano Apr 2018

bully

Id like to take this time to remind everyone that the flowers that rise to great pastures

Grow from the same dirt as the weeds

And that even sunlight can burn and water can make you bleed.

I think we forget that the world is so full of evil. I mean we see it every day, but we live for the moment,

So our view is deceitful.

My eyes have been scratched by the dull and broken needle,

But ive also taken the time to be the surgeon.

Ive slayed no demons, they live inside of me,

Warm and welcome with my memories of tears shed by these hands.

Though its true, we all deserve a second chance…

One cant help but wonder if thats propaganda from the past.

An idea let slither so that evil people can rise again,

A constant fault when all we are is dusty wind.

I know im broken and that can be fixed,

But id rather not be.

Thats it.

#ptsd