Maldita lengua mia!
No para de decir incoherencias
por haber una carencia
no entiendo esta impotencia
de donde viene
si se queda
o si se va
si me toca un poco
o si me mata y se va.

Sentirse intrigado
por lo nuevo
por el presente y sus misterios
por el pasado
por eso que no concluyo en nuestras almas
y nos cruje todavia

Sentirse irritado
por no estar donde queremos estar
por haber soltado cuando habia que agarrar

Siento esto, aquello
y pienso
pero no entiendo
me exigen un cambio ya
por favor paren un poco nomas

If you want to know
what is happening
to the world,
don't just watch
the news every night;
watch what happens
to yourself
after watching
the news
every night.

I think of the men I've exhaled
Salty and in charge,
They swirled around in my thoughts
Entrancing me with shadowy shimmers
Cosmic vibrations and mystic visions
Enveloped across my soggy sore soul.

I ate my own soul for lunch today.
I am my own and my own angel
Programmed and primed not delicate enough for words
I wish I could entwine my pragmatic, cutlass wisdom
Into the sticky, soggy, sore soul.

Carol Ann Duffy could write for trillions of years
About me, about her, about every one of the millions to be heard
Exhausting is the useless, their one *****, soft and shallow pierces
It's a story we all may very well know
However it's another thing to drop this muted partner
Dump it into the Indian Ocean, let it go
Continue forward, marching on.

I loved myself more every yesterday
Seems my youth is draining with age

"Wasn't I beautiful, fragrant and young?"

Perhaps, but no one said the Queen was built in a day.

Wisdom should entwine my soul, not listless lovers
"I refuse to give up my obsession"
But you mishear, somehow my obsession is ME

ME ME ME

My sticky, soggy, sore soul.
The girl with unkempt hair and a messy soul.

If I was dead,
And my bones adrift
Like dropped oars
In the deep, turning earth;

Or drowned,
And my skull
A listening shell
On the dark ocean bed;

If I was dead,
And my heart
Soft mulch
For a red, red rose;

Or burned,
And my body
A fistful of grit, thrown
In the face of the wind;

If I was dead,
And my eyes,
Blind at the roots of flowers
Wept into nothing,

I swear your love
Would raise me
Out of my grave,
In my flesh and blood,

Like Lazarus;
Hungry for this,
And this, and this,
Your living kiss.

The inadequate bookshelf that sat near the door
that my sister used to call her own was
mostly made up of adolescent reads,
books better suited for preteen girls rather than
intellectually budding young ladies—
juvenile vocabularies and simple, non-complex
plot lines do little to craft and create
worldly, knowledgeable women.

I thought I must spring clean the
naiveté away and replace it with
the works of great authors like
Sylvia Plath
                        Simone de Beauvoir
                                                              Virginia Woolf
                        Margaret Atwood
Betty Friedan;
ingenious femme fatales that cut down
to the brittled bones of the misogynists
and burned their marrow along with the
ashes of bras and aprons and 350 degree oven heat.  

Growing up, to me, seemed like a wonderful epiphany
chock-full of ideas and opinions and
clever, ironic remarks that chased satirical witticisms
like felines to rodents and wolves to deer—
being an adult would guarantee me a say,
a vote
           prior 1920’s America
                                                  play dress up as a suffragette
           women’s rights
femininity personified by dolls in plastic houses.

To be eighteen-years-old,
the goal, the legality, the bright light at the end of the tunnel;
the official womanhood it would bestow upon me
seemed like something almost tangible
with the way that it loomed over my head.

Get good marks
graduate high school
travel back in time sixty years
meet a nice boy
become a “good wife”
have dinner ready by five
bear two beautiful heirs
clean up the messes left in the kitchen
fast-forward to the twenty-first century
go to a good college
find a stable career
settle down if the fancy strikes you
live non-docile and full of passion—
the parallelism of times are severely
di
    lap
          i
            dat
                 ­ ed.

1950’s America would never be a home for me
because I am much too wild to be contained.