May 2013
25 posts
3 tags
Haiku 5.19.13
You have to want change;
to climb ladders and stairs to
catch trains to new homes.
4 tags
Haiku 5.18.13
I only know how
To love the way that asks if
You’re ready to drown.
5 tags
Haiku 5.17.13
She could walk waters,
swim Everest, kite me moon…
But she couldn’t speak.
4 tags
Freewrite. 5.16.13
as soon as we learned how to count
our pasts and hopes
beyond
the things our fingers could hold,
everything turned to math.
we tripped and
fell and
became an equation,
a scale,
a problem:
something to be solved.
the type of thing you
can chart on graph paper
and that calculators can
boil into numbers
small enough that they rattle around
in mouths like loose change
in baggy...
“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull...”
– Virginia Woolf, from Selected Essays (via illusionsvk)
5 tags
Conversation Series #6
Me: what's all of this?
Her: I bought supplies.
Me: it looks like you're building a sun box; is an eclipse coming?
Her: not for another 6 months.
Me: ... Okay...
Her: this is for when you smile.
Her: I want to be ready.
4 tags
5.13.13
She crossed and
stretched her arms and hands;
used a cashmere collar to
pull her curls into a crown
and when they fell back
towards earth and every chakra
I knew how to open,
there were droplets of
light
falling out {onto};
(over)
the holes I’d dug ]into[
)out of(
myself.
5 tags
Mother's Day Haiku+2
I breathe, because
She did; long enough to know
That the air here was
Worth it.
4 tags
Haiku 5.11.13
I know we just met,
but thank your mom for sewing
her earth with my smiles.
5 tags
5.10.13
Her dress hadn’t seemed
that ready to loose itself
until it fell
off like it saw it’s freedom
lying on the floor around her ankles
She was all “Put-up-or-shut-up,” and “follow-suit-or-turn-away.”
So
he undressed himself —
showed
skin and scabs
and suture scars;
there were places he looked like
an amateur first attempt at
quilt work.
...
5 tags
Freewrite 5.9.13
My hands always shake
when I hold her
up:
like a map I’m struggling and
hungry to read
under divebar lights —
she, and I, and everything that lives in the
negative space between our shadows;
four shots wet, me frantically
stenciling her curvature on to
anything I can convince myself
might be more permanent
than this moment:
napkins wet from
the...
5 tags
5.8.13
Couldn’t feel
your ‘far’
until a cell phone
picture of ‘close’
reminded me
of how when I reach
my arm out (as
far as it goes),
i’m barely
breaking the surface of the water;
left asking whether
you were the stone
that caused the ripples
running up my fingers
like they know me
4 tags
5.7.13
Tomorrow:
wake; laugh uncontrollably
a shout-followed-by-an-apology-because-you-didn’t-mean-to-be-that-loud
or a guffaw-guffaw-guffaw-snort
for each time you ran yourself
ragged
chasing
love;
trying to clutch
water in leather-pruning palms
you blamed your fingers and knuckles
for their leaks and insolvencies,
like they weren’t exactly the way
God gave them to you,
...
4 tags
“You know what, though? Coffee.”
– (c) God on the morning, and again on the afternoon of the 8th day as he looked out onto this now not-so-new-and-mostly-used-up-because-humans-are-savage-in-nature-and-heart world.
Anonymous asked: Your poems are super dope. I hat yet to read one I don't like. You have a gift. Continue to give the world your writing. We need it.
5 tags
Haiku 5.6.13
My soul learnt stirred from
times I stole dreams from catchers
just to kiss you in.
5 tags
5.6.13
She got lost at the corner;
that place where his dimples broke open
and formed a delta;
mouth of tooth and gum and voice and tongue
fertilized by a lifetime more smiles
than numbers know how to name.
She immediately became
overwhelmed
by all the deficiencies
she’d never had problems counting up to.
Tried to add up the downs and get a number that felt right for him,
and...
4 tags
Believe in your climb -- Freewrite 5.3.13
Molehills feel like mountains
to men who have invested their lives
living from the waist up;
divesting their legs at the knee,
breaking their hearts and hopes
into a stride that made
passers by comfortable
and let them blend
into the pack.
3 tags
Freewrite 5.3.13
The closest thing to happy
this young life has learnt
was when she handed me a palette
full of colors I couldn’t name
and kissed me into a painter;
kissed herself into a canvas;
let me brush stroke her into a portrait
of what it
feels like inside of my hands when i looked at her.
“Our chains, sometimes, come to define us.”
5 tags
Freewrite 5.2.13
And then suddenly:
you feel the bottoms your shoes turn to omnivorous mouths of starving shop-vacs —
you feel your soul grabbing,
clawing, desperate against
whatever lives at the bottom of your stomach
as it is inhaled through your soles
and left in the fear-filled footprints you’ve
never
not
walked
in
You almost break your neck,
looking back out of a window that...
1 tag
“Yeah? Well. Ya’ Momma.”
– African Proverb
3 tags
Freewrite 5.1.13
They never tell you
that the speed you reach
on
the
way
down
when you trip,
or base jump
and
(free)fall into someone else’s life
is equal to the weight
you will have to carry
in order to climb them
out of yours.
Anonymous asked: I love your work
4 tags
Haiku 5.1.13
she was claw and fang;
hips, and curves, and buoyant lungs.
and I was empty.
5 tags
Freewrite 4.30.13 (22/30)
Never stopped, or asked
what happened inside —
how you might have found your faith affected
when I sharpened the notes from your songs
and flew them off the first cliff I was able to find
or stood on your praise until I was sure
it’s pulse had gone as flat as Brittney singing in the bathroom.
I never asked if it, or you ever re-inflated, and songbirded your way to...
6 tags
21/30
I
Was
Going
To
Write
Today
But
When
I
Put
The
Pen
On
The
Paper
I
Couldn’t
Remember
How
To
Spell
Your
Name.
I wonder if you forgot me, too.
April 2013
27 posts
5 tags
20/30
like a man walking a wire
between buildings that scrape up and through
the bottoms of clouds
who has fallen and
somehow
not broken,
but bounced.
tightropes that bridge and
separate attractive
from attracted
are exercises in the
balancing of
inequity
5 tags
19/30
No one blushes or winks at
caterpillars or grubs, they
only look at you doe-eyed
and ask your life story over
dinners, and drinks, and breakfasts
once you let the scars on your back
cocoon into wings and
reveal your royalty.
5 tags
Haiku 4.29.13
we will strip to bone
to prove we want a future
someone else prescribed.
7 tags
17/30
We turned
our tongues;
reduced them to simple machines:
all equal and opposite forces, and
objects in motion;
symbolic of
nothing more than
their physics and
physicalities —
tried to see-saw them to fulcrum
and levers we could use to pry eachother open
twisted like screws: loosed and driven like we
were trying to fix our hulls and
these sinking ships our mouths
...
5 tags
16/30
I woke up and realized
that I had been struggling to be loveable
in spite of this ugly
my entire life.
And if anyone told me that I was beautiful before you did, I don’t think I heard them
or it sounded like charity
or it sounded like consolation
or it was invariably sharing an Alaska sized border with the phrase “but I think we should be friends.”
It wasn’t until you looked at...
6 tags
15/30
She was all dark
in the part of her that gave me light;
fumbled around my praise
like she was brand new
in a dark room —
lost, and searching;
trying to find a light switch
so she could see herself for
the first time.
4 tags
Conversation Series #5 (14/30)
Him: I wasn't born with strong arms or strong legs or a stable frame.
Him: I've been working out. Trying to be better.
Him: I wanted to be something to help you stand on days when I, or you, or the world made you weak in the knees, but
Him: It just feels like I'm never standing still enough these days to hold you anything other than down or back or under.
Him: ... feels like for us, being tethered to each other is never a good thing... feels like the connection is tempered, and chain-linked, anchored to something that we don't know how to carry between us.
Him: And you never put on your legs to move with me...
Him: Or maybe I was just the wrong speed
Him: The wrong stride
Him: Maybe I smell bad
Him: Maybe I remind you of my father, even though you've never known him.
Him: Or smell like some other he did, and you swore you would never let him clip-wing you again.
Him: Maybe I remind you of something too close to forever, or too not from now, or too much like a then written longhand on a chalkboard that isn't close enough for you to read.
Him: I should have known that. Should have remembered that your prescription is out-dated and I should have brought you your contacts.
Him: I don't know. But I'm sorry for whatever it is.
Him: I just....
Her: *signs offline*
2 tags
“I love you. I know because I can’t stop bending letters you didn’t...”
– Wednesday
7 tags
13/30 (Rain Dance)
counter-polar emotions
pyrexed into prism
smoked in rapid succession
she was the Mojave,
she was an Amazonian rain dance,
was shaman,
was conqueror,
was sister,
scared shitless;
she knew she would be a mother one day,
and if this was this, then what would that be?
She stared right through me.
I didn’t have the balls to ask what she was looking for.
I watched her...
6 tags
12/30
It feels like
every poem I write these days
is either about you,
or an attempt at psalve or… psalm,
keystroke baptisms,
buttons pressed to and through holy water
like coarse grounds in French presses;
like prayers inhaled on the floor of swimming pool deep ends;
after all — things that matter are usually in danger of drowning and
must be
whispered
even in crowded bars, two...
8 tags
Conversation Series #4 (11/30)
One: I waited.
One: Waited long enough that I forgot that's what I was doing.
One: So long that at one point I stopped thinking you would actually come back, and was waiting for my hope to die so I could leave.
One: Have you ever walked to the kitchen, and opened the fridge or cabinet, and immediately forgot what you went there for?
One: Just stood, confused, scratching your head, trying to find a name for the food you're looking for.
One: I forgot your name when you closed the door. I have not eaten since then.
One: I have never forgotten that I needed to eat, but you took the 'how' of it with you.
One: I have been hungry since you left.
Two: I love you.
Two: You look different now.
Two: You look like a star map.
Two: Your beard has molted; it used to be only city polluted night sky. Full and dark. Built of late night walks from cabs and cars and planes and trains to my apartment, knocking at my door in all hours of most nights. I would pretend not to hear some times.
Two: You were full of too much woke, and too little sleep, and completely devoid of any thought that 'this' might not be the way to live.
Two: Now it is full of constellations.
Two: Now I want to give you my address.
Two: Now I want you to knock, like you did then.
Two: Heaven painted along your jaw. Did you name any of these star-shapes after me?
Two: You always used to tell me my eyes reminded you of Andromeda, back when you used to spend so many prayers asking me to take off my chains.
One: They were all named after you.
One: I just wish you had seen them before. Before they burned themselves out pushing light across the cosmos. You don't know it, but those stars are gone. You're just far enough away that you can still see their light shining.
One: They are more pull than push, now.
One: So used to giving off light, in case you ever needed it to find your way home.
One: But time and love, like light, have a speed limit, and like fire, they burn out when there is no kindle added, and like the stars: just because you can spend hours looking up at me, painting your life into its glow and dance, my beard is not yours anymore.
One: *exhales*
One: I've been waiting to tell you that for some time.
6 tags
10/30
There’s none left in my dressers
or in the closet
or in toothbrush cups.
These are the first places I purged.
If I survive this, I’m writing a book titled:
For colored boys who have considered burning the sheets
because Tide and Clorox and OxiClean and fresh linen spray
is not enuf
to remove the remnants and reminders.
They never warn you.
Pad your pillows with...
7 tags
9/30
You always drew us inside of lines:
blended wax like candles that burned too close
wiping skin tones and life onto
cartoon faces
and hands
in beautiful hues
that Crayola should have paid you for.
If you had a color named after you it would be hope.
You taught me how to
obey bold borders and made the most
negative space, like a coloring book savant.
You never let yourself be...
3 tags
(8/30) 4.17.13
I couldn’t help it:
I spent myself broken for
days,
weeks,
months;
reaching,
chasing,
after her
as though
she were ever mine to
get back.
7 tags
7/30 (Magic Bag Lady, 4.10.13)
I never knew if she was spot-lit,
or if my heart was InstaGram filtering the information
between my retina and visual cortex —
but she was illuminated.
I wanted to ask her how she could
glow this, inside of
(in spite of)
the darkness, but instead
I used my lungs and mouth and throat to
practice saying things other than ‘goodbye.’
I’ve learned better than
demanding too much...
6 tags
6/30
Yesterday I spent the
majority of the day —
all of the time I could find in my wallet —
looking in the mirror,
re-learning how to smile,
rinsing my mouth out single-malt antiseptic,
repeating until I couldn’t taste
anything
except clean
speaking into the ether;
slurring into the reflection of this thing that I’ve become:
“best yet, doesn’t...
“You. Set. Your. Ceiling.”
– Take me higher.
5 tags
5/30 (Arroz/Leche 4.6.13)
her skin reminded me of horchata;
her lips reminded me of my thirst,
her hands pulled me toward quench,
she had cinnamon and vanilla
buried just below her surface;
I could smell it dancing from the pores
between earlobe and clavicle.
I stopped occasionally
to let her kiss me back, or
to talk about Sao Paolo and Samba and Verocai
or Cuba and her abuela’s Arroz con Pollo....
7 tags
4/30 (Snow Leopards Cannot Be Domesticated,...
My momma asked me
why I would want to kiss a mouth full
of steel and lead,
as if taste testing scalpel would prepare me for the carve —
like when you dip foot into cold water
and try to brace yourself for what it will feel like pulling you down by your neck.
She asked why I would kiss a mouth without a tongue,
only teeth,
built for deforestation,
all slash and weld and...
2 tags
“For her,
I was a crash-test dummy with the pedal down,
texting about the...”
– 4.3.13
6 tags
3/30 (For Nessy 4.3.13)
Now Playing: The Root x D’Angelo (Voodoo)
I went to the doctor, but he told me there ain’t nothin’ wrong.
I told him I beg to differ…
because every time I try to look forward,
she’s in front of me.
The opthamologist said that when he dilated my left pupil
he could see you standing there
Calf-deep; stradling the line between cornea and iris.
I told him...
