esto es un boceto para algo más complejo que ya viene, ya viene...
just a little sketch for something bigger and better...

huellas siempre son negativas: presencia que no está:

I would like to pause for a moment
and bow my head – or maybe simply bow –
to first loves.
Madness, the might of maybe, magic… mmmm…
to savor the sensual sound of the beloved’s breath,
to plunge into skin like a fanatic in trance,
to indulge amorous nonsense that claims no stance
but rather falls wildly without flailing (free),
held all the way down to subconscious glee
in the beloved’s embrace,
abandoning self in connection...

I would like to now collect myself (what’s left of me)
and give a nod – or maybe simply nod –
to home sweet home.
Let me lay my head in her lap,
and sleep deeply, for, for now,
a simple nap simply won’t do me.
Her soft eyes on me when I drift off,
and my eyes on her when I come to anchor,
not looking for something not yet found,
but rather mining mystery’s infinitely explorable layers.

A couple of centuries after the last great wars, people began to spin. This may sound strange at first, but it was in fact a mind- and body-altering custom that changed the way that human beings related to each other and the world. Basically, people got frustrated with only seeing 180 degrees (if that), so they began to spin, all the time. At first it was a subculture, which some accused of cult-like status, but since it just looked like so much fun, everyone tried it. Soon it became a worldwide phenomenon, due to the health and perceptual effects (exercise and 360 degreeness, respectively). While walking, sitting in specially designed chairs, and even in the latest automobile, spinning became the latest technology and fashion. After the initial wave, there was a backlash, but because of the heightened awareness of the spinners, the non-spinners were overwhelmed logistically and militarily.

okay, okay, so it's been a long time since I've posted... but now I have a bit of visual, sonic and theoretical poetry combined! click on the YouTube icon at the bottom right to go to YouTube and click on "watch in high quality" to see it bigger and better. enjoy!

You ask me where I stand.
What you mean (as I understand) is:
where do you base your conclusions,
where do you base this self from which these conclusions come?
I stand on shifting sands.
Let me clarify: the movement isn’t earthquaking or tectonic
nor even jarring-shaking or chronically unsettling;
rather it is and has always been
a constant flow of seething grains that gather momentum
and then come in hordes towards a single destination
and then en masse flee from where they just arrived
and then find a new space to occupy.
So I dance, and try to have my stance flow
with these infinite strands of pulverized land.

Rough hands lay every brick in Chicago
Now, mountains of mortar surround
South Side grandmas’ eyes
that have never seen hill,
canyon, starry sky splendor or sea.
They grimace
at the grit that man’s expansion paid for
as hands laid more and more
blocks for work-eager newcomers…
but man, just sit still a moment,
take stock of the current situation:
grandfather, unemployed for generations,
toyed with by ghetto-raping politicians,
alienation scraping at your crumbling door…
imagine the torture to step outside
to see slum-trashed abandoned lots…
please let my lines be a slight-binding suture
in our ruptured social fabric,
let me give you a lyrical lift,
a ride on my rhyme
so you may live what’s been denied…
but man, form flounders
in intellectual abyss, beyond the reach
of any but dreary divers...
but perhaps they will pass the pearls along…

Flying far from factory funeral desolation,
meet the ancient face of this artificial nation:
scarred, scored, worn by centuries’ wild West wind,
flameful breath sparking stone with sand
until the visage stands stark and stolid,
creases sweeping like highways through solid folds
that sigh skywards; behold it and marvel,
know that we travel somewhere in the midst
of the mountain’s streaking skids of colors,
that our matter’s somewhere in the center
with the natural fountain’s soaring chatters.
There our ancestors’ bones mix
with the peat-stone-silt to be ground
by gravity into lesser moans that regret not,
lament not and sit not still though they never will
move visibly – they seethe in the grooves
left by the swords that fell from the hordes
that cleft their words from the land,
and thus we’re not bereft of the fruit
of the work of their hands for still we see
their presence in the sand they tilled that sifts
and shifts through generations of formations
that have gently set upon the qualms of this nation
(our bloody history and shoddy society)
the calm building blocks for a new creation.

If you’re going to break down, break down in bed. Not here, not in the bathroom, where you know you’ll never reach that eyes-gazing-into-themselves-in-mirror clarity of vision. No, don’t break down here, where you’ll end up with head in hands, thoughts swimming between deafly ringing ears. Not here. Break down in bed, where you’ll quiver without jarring bones or scraping skin. In bed, where you know you’ll slide sobbing to sleep, where oblivion will engulf raw and bleeding emotion or where dreams will embrace raucous feeling into their ever mutating, transforming and potentially emancipating arms. No mirror clarity tonight. Break down in bed, where you’ll truly disintegrate, where you won’t simply chip a tooth or break a nail, where you’ll nerves will fizzle out of your pores, where you’ll be shot into the air on a gasp of despair, into the air where you’ll look down in panic and supernova, becoming a outward-hurtling junkheap of pathologies that will descend back down to Earth, where their radioactive remains will blanket the contours of the surface, creating a glowing silhouette: that’s the most clarity that you will get tonight. So now raise your face from your hands. Don’t glance in the mirror as you pass. Calmly open the door and walk down the hall. Enter your citylight-reflecting-off-of-smog -lit bedroom. Lay down. Break down.

As we enter year 6 of the war in Iraq, exceed 4,000 American soldiers killed, and pass between 80 and 90,000 Iraqi civilians killed, I thought I'd publish this poem from 2003.

I am you, US

I have reams of dreams (just)
screamin to be released (to have peace)
from their back-shelf solitude,
where they brood with ceaselessly crude
but potentious attitude
hootin boozin and shootin
for my pie-in-the-sky artificial highs to trouble my
bubbly moods, to force me to the coarse/course
to peruse and eventually vocally, locally use
their unrequited blues to proclaim their slighted, urgent news
that I been lazy, my mind’s sinned (hazy)
thinkin I grinned on hi-fi, removed from
the drive-by’s shocksong when I’ve known all along
how quick that violently slick seedy shit has flown around
to grow from the common to my higher ground (zero)
where the 9-1-1 glow has shown we reap what’s been sown
(and sometimes I try to deny that it’s doubly towerin so
when single CEOs seem to run the show
and are deemed key-to-the-city worthy
to reap oily spoils when whole peoples cower
in fear since showerin heatful sparks sear memory
with clear signs of smoke-dark skies;
lies about global liability have choked stark responsibility).

Time to wake up, find what kind of forgotten-shelf shake-up
will make myself face up those woe-begotten tracts
of visionary facts that speed my evolutionary pace up
yet avoid those drastic acts that in time stoke the spastic fire
that chokes reasonable higher minds’ dream desires
into mean crime and smoke.

It’s been a long time since I seen my baby
I’s doin’ fine till the waves’ wat’ry sheen
Hit me like the sight of my all-night lady,
The day she caught me, queen of common things.

It’d been a long day and I’d lost my taste for breathing
So I stumbled my way to the tides’ in-out
Rise and fall gather-release, and its briny seething
Crept in my lungs’ creases, inspired a fell shout:

I twirl’d me ‘bout, hands to sky, fell to sand,
Unable to stand the ground’s harsh feel
I clawed reeling at sky to deny the land…
Then above me she appeared, so real

With briny breath to flavor unsavored ideas;
Wave-shine gaze to corrugate all dull metal mental haze;
Root-firm hands that delve through false-floor sterile veneer
Through fearful surface to grasp hidden, solid ways;

Hands that suddenly grasped me by my sailing palms,
Tugged me to gasping feet and flailing thoughts as my heart raced to keep up
As she dragged me smilingly to give thanks and alms
Through acrimonious, grungy alley’s blues-rock and hubbustling boulevard’s bebop

Of people like pebbles jostling through a landslide.
On a stroll like a cyclone we took the town by storm
Taking objects in our path with such force in our minds
That they took on new life, from freezing wrath to bliss-hued warmth.

Plastic tatters flagging the breeze from brightly barbed fence
Were transformed into hula skirt for the vain
As she crowned me king of uncontainable nonsense
With thirteen steely links of newly broken chain…

Somehow, after so long balanced by her passion spell
I lost her in the clenched teeth grind of the crowd’s respiration
So now I stand drenched on the shore of despairing pell-mell
And can only chant this disintegrating song’s aspiration:
Return, my love!

It’s been a long time since I seen my baby
I’s doin’ fine till the waves’ wat’ry sheen
Hit me like the sight of my all-night lady,
The day she caught me, queen of common things.

every passing thought that you discard, disregard, or partly destroy,
that flees the best of your mind’s ploys in the moment of its finding,
that dives to the deep without warning, as far gone as widows’ mourning,
must be followed down the steep descent into dark, like the reflection
of the eye’s shiny spark in the mirror, the neverending gaze amplified
regard in regard and never dies no matter how hard you try, how deep you fly

oh
so
bright.
spotlight blinds
you quite as surely
as it gives others sight.

Carwheels on gravel
like teeth crunching Grape Nuts
like rain on rubber stretched taut
like sizzling onions
Powerline poles
like marching soldiers suddenly surrendered
like strung-together marionettes
like synchronized swimmers
Thoughts on the road
like wildly, slowly growing ivy
like the water cycle (liquid-solid-liquid-gas)
like metaphors

When I was a young student, stuck in the limbo of still wearing my pigtails but already bearing my period, my two most powerful educational experiences:

One of my teachers told me he had something that he wanted to show me. So he brought me into the most out-of-the-way bathroom in the school, on the fourth and top floor, where few people ever went. He brought me inside, and since I was just a child, I was not worried until I saw him shut and lock the door behind us. He walked toward me, and I started to feel panic pounce, but then he continued past me. My worry turned to confusion as I saw him unlatch the window, slide up the pane, and hoist himself through to the roof. As he turned and extended his hand to me, I understood: he was inviting me to escape. We walked to the edge of the roof and peeked at the pavement below, the neat rectangles of the sidewalk. My teacher gestured vaguely at the view, and told me that sometimes in order to get a better perspective you need to get above and beyond the structures that have been made to contain you. He risked everything – job, career, reputation – in order to tell me that. As if I didn’t know it instinctively already.

One of my classmates was taped to the post in the center of the school cafeteria. I remember I was sick that day, or on the other side of the school or something. As I remember it, I was terrified upon hearing this story with its grisly details. The detail that really destroyed me was not that practically the entire school, which habitually mobs the cafeteria during passing periods, had looked on as the bullies manhandled their scrawny catch, looped duct tape around him and left him bound to go to class… but rather what killed me was when I was told that not a single student out of six hundred set him free once the bullies left, leaving him there for five minutes until a teacher happened along. I remember being horrified by this event, grateful that I wasn’t there to witness it, yet fascinated by its implications.

Anyways, I have a terrible memory. So I hold on to what I remember as if it were a teddy bear and I a baby.