Teasing the beast
Looking for a feast

Hounds barking at our ears
Vultures flying up ahead
Circling a bald eagle's fresh corpse

Compartmentalizing symptom after symptom
To hide the great systematic sickness
Labeling the suffering, outcome from desire

We, wholeheartedly accepting being
Appropriated, labeled, discarded
As construing our own oppression and sadness

Enduring the **** of our minds
Being castrated of our consciousness
Before we reap the products
Of its bold liberation and grandness

Its the belly of the beast
And its hungry
Insatiable, amoral entrails
Hoping to salvage a feast
From the casualties of d(e)moc(ratic) wars

Hoping we feed our monstrous fear
Thirsting for the greed
Dripping off of accumulating wealths
Impatiently waiting, we keep parceling out grudges

Disfiguring our minds, our souls, and our bodies
Its misanthropic nature lashes out without conscience
Knowing we'll never realize we are masses

Disappearing the individuals who realize their suffering
Ensuring there's no collective opposition or action
Trying to reassure we are weak

Knowing at some point or another
We all act mute, deaf, and blind when anyone experiences:
Oppression
Pain
Silencing
****
Hunger
Fear
Violence
­Repression
Retaliation
Discrimination
Torture
Negation
Alienation­
All forms of mental, psychological, physical, and spiritual mutilation
Fearing death more than fighting for necessary abolishment
Preferring to live out our veiled miseries
Endorsing their continuance
Instead of risking our lives for everyone's liberation
Always ensuring the feast of the beast

By its very efforts trying to decree our very human nature
Ingraining greed, fear, animosity, and weakness as if inherent of us
All parts of its most damaging weapon:  the seed of discord
Its implantation, a socialized deep desire for self-preservation

Sheep bleating painfully toward our ears
Vultures flying up ahead
Circling a bald eagle's fresh corpse
Signifying the impending recapturing
Of our true transformative desires

a raven, alone in an old empty church
living by the silence of the moonlit night;
soars into the sky; crying on a silver birch
of seeing other creatures being recognized,
a raven, a captive of every old yearning vow
seeks a better place, yet wings are broken;
if only this strident world is listening now,
that raven might whisper its existence.

S T R A N G E !
I woke up this morning with tears in my eyes,
and I don't know what's the reason behind.

S T R A N G E !
But it never made me sad or depressed anymore,
maybe a better healing of something I don't know.

S T R A N G E !
My first time to wake up on a wet pillow this morning,
I forgot my dream, all I know is that I woke up crying.

When we think about the choices in our lives
When we fight and we bicker and become bitter
When we think there is only power or powerlessness

If we can realize that there is power and powerlessness
Then haven't we began to acquire consciousness
In that instance haven't we began the process of choice

That there is those who have not have given birth to this consciousness
To those who have only lived powerlessness
And know nothing else
Haven't you owed them part of your consciousness
That you have ceased to be one of them
Or your mere power has denied one of them

That there is no choice for them
Because they haven't birthed that consciousness
And if you choose power they'll remain powerless
Because within you there is no loyalty, right?
It is a choice predicated by an erroneous concept of self-preservation

It is a treacherous dichotomy; doesn't make sense
This is not an indictment of your desire not to suffer
Because surely to hold power would cease your suffering
But it is this type of power that thrives on the proliferation of powerlessness
This conceptual understanding of what it means to have power
That is not what we've come learn, but readily ascribe to

That a mind and body can cultivate power
That can be harvested, shared, communal
For the sole purpose of the survival of the other, not the self

That that can survive in this world is impossible
Its antithetical to the modes of production
In which our societies operate and thrive

How can workers begin to derive power from their collective efforts
How can workers' purchasing power equal the power of the production of their labor

How can any community in any corner of the world escape
The misanthropic missions of first world free trade capitalism

When will we reclaim our escaping humanity
When will we cease to keep feeding the system with our minds, our bodies, our labor

How much longer can we become fodder, scraps, waste feeding the machine
And don't think that you are safe when you have made it
When you have entered the circle of dominance
Because it is then when you will loose your humanity or die

It is at that apex of power that your presence becomes
Just as dispensable as that of the powerless
Because to maintain that circle of dominance
Requires a total conversion to misanthropy

The rigor with which your power will be required
To keep proliferating powerlessness will give no break
And when you become useless, it will replace you

So that we must realize that the modes of production
That we allow to exploit us
In powerlessness, or the semblance of power
Can never safeguard our humanity

How much further will we allow power to be concentrated
So that soon we ourselves, or our children won't have a choice
Won't have the consciousness of power just powerlessness

I am frozen to my core,
shocked,
and amazed at the turbulence
that surrounds me
and controls my fate.

(My future is no longer my own,
it changes with the whimsy of the waves.)

I cannot control my limbs,
I lash out,
but I am lost
unable to find myself in the dark;

still shaking,

even after I've opened my eyes
I can feel the water
filling my lungs,
dragging me down.

I am terrified.

Yet,

I want to drown
in you.

Wake Up Wretched World,

I assert my Indigenous heritage
I self identify
With the ancestors of my continent

Identity afraid to articulate
Culture, unknowingly belonging to me
Cycle of shame now shattered

Product of love, hatred, lust, and desire
europeans plundering my mother Latin America
In chaos and violence, my skin's pigment
Has been engineered through the mestizaje
Of my Indigenous forefathers

How could I not forget my lineage
When the historical legacy of modernization
Has been to massacre the consciousness
Of where my people really come from

Erasing indigenous pride
Making Paisano and Indio
Synonymous with poverty and alienation
Insulting the humbleness
State of hunger you've left us in

Original lineage within me disturbed
So you push me to ambiguity and embarrassment
Not white, not indigenous?

Pure indigenous brothers and sisters silenced
Not an exploitable consumerist market, not in your campaigns
Not benefactors of your philanthropic development tactics
Bodies too costly to abuse, no reason to bring them
Into the neoliberal multinational corporate circuit

Constantly driving them off productive land
Because they choose to assert their identity
Live in collective communes, not owing you nothing
Waiting for them to make barren lands productive
So you can take those lands too

Not capturing an obscure history, these are not colonial times
This is the legacy of the european presence entering mother Latin America
21st century still defiling Indigenous cultures to civilize and modernize