you are (here)

It is pronounced: map. One syllable with proper push of “pppp” at the end. 

Or atlas, if you’re lucky to have a gathering of many.

They can be found in glove compartments in automobiles and in backpacks, folded neatly like an intricate fan of coordinates.

Lately, it can also be found with a mouthpiece, titled GPS. A rotation of satellites orbiting in the sky– when positioned correctly– can let you know whether you need to make a left or right or….

RECALCULATING….

On a road trip many years ago, in a subaru hatchback with enough room in the back for a foam mattress, there was no voice letting us know how to get to where we needed to go. We dug out a rand mcnally and leafed through pages that could have been called art. When we got lost, we stopped somewhere and asked for directions. Conversed with locals and breathed in the air of new (to us) land.

Then, we weren’t reliant on fancy phones guiding our every move.

Then, there was no contraption plugged into car to dictate our route.

Then, adventures felt more FREE form.

We have forgotten how to get lost. We dig out our lovers from left or right pocket, swipe in several directions to get us where we need to go.

We don’t wander as much.

Some don’t wander at all.

I am detached from a GPS. I carry around tiny pieces of paper with tiny shards of ink curled in, with my directions, that I carefully looked up. But if I get lost, I ask those around me who are attached. Or…I allow myself to wander until I really need to be where I need to be.

You are ****here******.

But maybe you can get there a little slower. Leave earlier next time and give yourself extra room for wandering. Slice in a little escapade into your day.

You may be surprised by your ability to go a few more minutes, even hours without the help of your palm pilot.

is this thing on?

Check the heartbeat of your city. Are the traffic lights stuttering? Is there congestion on its street corners? How smooth is its street-flesh? When was the last time it had a full check up?

I’ve got enough calluses on my feet to remind me that I am city-living. I inhale the beautiful soot of new york and get lost. I travel without electronic directional device, so when I turn incorrectly, I ask human beings: Where am I?

Over ten years minus about six months without health insurance and this earth can be quite scary without back-up sometimes. Several people in my life have told me to intentionally get lost: Go without maps and allow yourself to study parts of the wind you weren’t expecting to meet. Three years ago, a beautiful German with the blondest of dreadlocks told me: When you make the wrong turn, it becomes right.

So I turned my maps into paper airplanes and floated onward. Careful of the cracks and and inconsistency of sidewalks, I lifted up each foot so as not to fall. I wanted to see everything and yet feared falling. Suddenly, I realized I was collecting more fears. Choking and getting sick and infections and side-effects and migraines and whooping cough and chicken pox–even though I received it in my youth and it no longer exists.

I still wanted to be aimless and hippie and hunt and exist, yet I worried about the contagion of city.

Now, I am incorporating vocabulary back into my speech such as: HMO, copay and referrals. I am searching for doctors in my plan. Suddenly, I feel like an adult because I have…..health insurance.

I have deeply mixed emotions about this body I live in. I lost the keys a few times and I’ve had to break in. So, there are cracks and creaking floorboards inside me. There are tiny slits where the mice get in. There are drafts and mold, but it seems to be rent stabilized, so here I am.

Suddenly, I feel like I can address this body in ways I have been waiting to. Ready to see some doctors. Ready to articulate my sick. Prepared to get my heart checked.

on being.

The world has accused you of not being a world./You retort with an acceptance speech/scripted by beautiful gangsters. You live under/the thumb of contracts hoisted/like minarets. Landslides court you/with a hospice of deserted/checkout counters and comic strip altars.[1]   

My identity doesn’t fit on a napkin. I tell this to the well-dressed poet etching out a diagram of his thesis onto paper meant to wipe faces. He makes identity sound so easy and maybe it is for him, so I keep listening. Soon, I am lost in the distraction of his neck, whose tie seems birthed from its skin while the one around my neck seems far clumsier. I tell him it is not so easy to figure one’s self out and that even when we think we’ve got it down, something shifts. We are not static beings, I explained. And for the ones who think they are, I speculate on their true level of actualization (or their rush).

I am not the same me as I was ten years ago. Or five. Or even last week.

The lover who sits beside me gazes at my fingertips pressing into alphabet. This lover is tattooed with my handwriting across the lines of its skin. We gain splinters from each embrace and sift through our varying degrees of lust. This courtship of elocution does not have to end. Instead, we leave each other mid-sentence so we always have a reason to go back.

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[1] Italics by poet, Vincent Torro

Your/map/is marred/by borders/that become a sieve/of history, straining the wild/from the willing. Missions and malls encroach your sun swathed/villitas where flowers battle and murals proliferate like thirsty brushfires. 

How much of this you can read, I am not sure. How much of this you already know, you do not need to clarify. I have recently been solicited by an atlas. I am wooed in river slang and late-night mountain chants that chisel away the moan of my loneliness. At each border, we dislodge our jagged wounds and squat over the evidence of our whispers. Some things do not need to be shared with those in search of clues to our existence. Instead, we sift and call this a lung excavation or gender bending or self-love.

this is where we said goodbye.

You wanted to know all about risk. I drew you a map of my bloated feminine. You kissed your atlas into my pockets. I responded in a self-addressed explanation of why I long for you every day that I breathe fog from beneath my tongue. You moved in; I moved away. I take the ink climbing out of my cells and force-feed you a portrait of my bones from different points of view. You tell me that you preferred me when I was soft and still. I shake. I fed you lentils. You fed me your mother’s Spanish. We decided to form a band where we played music from our scars.

This one, I sing, is from that day I told you I’d remain if you did. 

Then we said goodbye.

And yet, I still follow your crumbs; they’ve become my meals.

what happens to you.

Dear Kazim,

As you walk through this day as though it were an infinite hallway gathering wisdom from its length, I travel beneath the plaster of earth. Underground, I contemplate how hungry I am for home. An old man once asked me: where is the place I call home? 

In that moment, I was sitting with my knees together, surrounded by other writers in a classroom with no windows. Everyone else’s answers could have been found on a map. I could not help to say: My body. My body is my home. 

But even as I spoke this, I knew it not to be true. I was still searching for my coordinates. My own body’s map was water-logged and torn. It was faded and almost unrecognizable as a means for being found or locating an elsewhere. However, I spoke this as my answer because it was my hope to feel home in this construction site.

Kazim, I am moving again. Change of address; new route; another attempt at peace. This residence I leave now is cracked like sharp confetti hitting  me into bruises and tears. I may need to lock all these boxes and things up into a rented square with no windows as I roam. I need to air out this body until I understand it as whole.

The moon last night pushed through a curtain of clouds and called out to me. REMAIN!

I breathed in its romantic shadows and fierce eye contact. This lover changes shapes each night, but it never tells me to go away. The moon flashes me through this darkness as I begin my walk toward elsewhere.

Kazim, you wrote: the day is a hallway I am/ walking through

I respond: this Brooklyn is a fist challenging / my breath control 

 

punch enough holes in body to allow words to seep out like language’d sap

To find out what was really there, look in the background. People will always smile for photographs but teeth are just a costume covering the cavities and undetected craters of sickness.

How to walk away from documentation when words never run out of film or flash and isn’t this just hypocrisy?

Go a day without telling it. Go a day without questioning every moment and just relax inside an image. A feeling. A sense.

I actually don’t need you to tell me you are sick. I can feel it each time you lean your hips into me. You don’t have to announce your sighs. I’ve turned you up like a radio; go ahead, static.

Is there a world which exists off this grid of electric wiring and photographic bragging?

I’ve turn this body into a machine. Aren’t all bodies machines. With coils and metal and marks and breaking and instructional manuals.

Place suffix firmly against…against….against anything in need of a derivative.

Send me a map. Go on. Cut it up like Burroughs did. Hand it back to me and calculate when my lost will arrive. Then wait for me to appear.