something found, something borrowed

He shows me a piece of glass, shaped like the moon landing, found while biking home from work.

“I was stopped at that intersection where we we were stopped by police that time we tried to break the rules. I looked down and there it was. Hopped off my bike, leaned it against my hips and picked it up. All its edges had been dulled; who knows how long it had been resting against Brooklyn pavement. But…”

I waited as his voice trailed off.

“But even as I put it in my pocket, I felt like I was borrowing it. Maybe that’s always how it is. We borrow the things we take from the earth and then when the earth is ready, it takes it all back.”

I tasted many words on the tip of my tongue, but I wanted him to continue. I wanted him to never stop talking.

“And look right here,” he points to several arches in the center of the glass. “Don’t you feel like it is an imprint of the moon landing? Minus the proud flag waving. But if I hold it a certain way…” He tilts the glass sideways. “…you can almost see the flag and feel the wind from its fabric swooshing against the air.”

“Something found, something borrowed,” I finally uttered.

“Exactly,” he said.

day 5: admittance.

I admit it was never the cats. And I’ve only been part of a gang of humans protesting body’s rights, but never part of a gang that initiates through bartered bruises. I admit it had nothing to do with the boy. Or the girl. Or that time that time. I can’t tell you who taught me, but I promise I never instructed another. I admit I’ve done it since the first time and I’d be lying if I told you there is a last time.

I admit this is not my real hair color. But what is really real on bodies?

I admit that I finally believe that the word love is not a noun or a verb. It is too bold to be a part of speech; it is the whole thing.

I admit that I sometimes write in library books because I have a difficult time not getting involved with words.

I admit I lie about my weight. And sometimes my age. And the strength of my wrists.

I admit I hold deep conversations with myself in the bathroom. And when I walk toward and away from places.

I admit I am difficult to learn. How could anyone possibly get in if I barely have entrance.

I admit I never really forgave you.

I admit that the most beautiful sight I have ever seen is the moon on a Friday after that evening nap and the moon when it still exists in the sky during early morning and the moon on Wednesdays when it is at its fullest figure and the moon when it reminds me of the fingernail I have torn off, which dangles between my teeth.

how to invoke religion while holding hands and sharing the heat of approaching summertime.

“I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars…I learned God’s true language is only silence and breath.”  –Kazim Ali (Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities)

Last summer, I found religion in the journal of a poet who described his hunger and silence while fasting for ramadan. I walked around taking slow, deliberate bites of whatever was around me. Napped on napping trees. Kissed beneath enough moon shadows to call myself a believer of things. Tried a new cuisine called sloped Brooklyn. Became a smoker briefly because I liked the way my breath would tangle with the invisibleness of air. Had a short love-affair with mayflies. Played ukelele on as many benches as my skin could find.

Weeks wait to be found before summer begins but check out this air! One can call themselves religious just by breathing. Just by emptying the winter from lungs and exhaling bouts of lonely or shiver or hungry. Hours can easily climb mountaintops. Clouds wait to be deciphered into a language of picture maps.

This time is different. You may use the same words for things but meanings no longer need to be still and unwavering. You can memorize a prayer like love and it can be new each time. How amazing! How wonderful to climb hands into another’s and trace the elongation of breath traveling without passport to another country just by feeling your way. 

Bodies are like religious institutions. Stained glass. Memorials. Psalms and palms. Sermons threading together the meanings of things.

We fast (figuratively and metaphorically) to remember why we hunger so much. We gain weight when we allow our bodies permission to hold on to what finally nourishes us.

there is colour here in this black-and-grey.

Call this Sunday. Order up two hundred kites shaped in sizes ranging from dragon to sperm whale. Turn up your boom box attached to hip, playing a mash-up of Charlie Parker and Tupac. Gather up your grass stains. Dig toes into flesh of earth, meaty syllables of soil. Stop worrying about what your hair looks like or if there is dirt on your face. You are meant to get messy sometimes. Write a poem on a rock, found beneath a leaf. Turn your handwriting upside down. Throw it into a puddle and if there are none nearby, make one with stored up tear drops, created by the wind. Have an impromptu picnic in your neighborhood park with local fruit purchased at nearby farmer’s market. Stain your fingertips with ink of recycled newspaper. Depending upon how bold you are, make love beneath this hunched-over sun and blanket hiding the limbs of you and your other. The ones nearby will leave you alone, too impressed by your boldness to interrupt. Remain until the air drops causing your sweat marks to shiver. Bike toward the sun’s replacement called: moon. This one is dripping lust. All around it echoes of moans. Offer up your black-and-grey lips to a rainbow. Watch the stain saturate the rest of you. Call this love’s contagion.

a moon haiku

under all this moon

the gravel is really clean

and lights up traffic

the sanity of soil

 

“In the garden of gentle sanity. May you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness.”   Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

This palm is fibrous, a woody husk hanging on to the instrumental shake of its juice. It grows in order to be eaten. This garden is progressive. It is hairy and hungry for soulmate of medicinal consumption. Annually, one wakes engulfed in the fear of placebo lust. Here, in this perforated part of Brooklyn, lucidity is found nearby between full-figured moon and switchblades of grass.

on closing doors & finding new ones to open to let the light in.

Turn the knob either way and find an opening toward closure. Forgiveness is a language similar to music. It is instrumental and improvisational and often moves through several octaves.

Choose an evening to walk behind the moon. Follow it like a song. Whistle it into the seams of your arms and legs. Squint away the glow until all you see is you.

When you think about an other, think about punctuation marks. Is it an exclamation mark or pause of comma or does it end?

I am safely semi-colon’ing. What I mean is, I am finding a connection between my independent parts. And here, is forgiveness. I forgive the parts that seem to be misplaced. That is, I am finding their place.

Forgive the ones that haunt. The humans and the limbs and the gender identifying markers that do not match our minds’ messages.

Forgive past loves because they showed you other things than hurt. They showed you pleasure and kindness and the flash of safety.

Forgive your body because it’s the one thing that has remained through all the traumas and wars with others and your self. Even when your body changes, it is still yours.

Forgive the memories. The gaps. The flustered darkness that does not want you to remember certain things.

Forgive time.

Forgive loneliness because one day you may be in a dark basement or elevated bridge and you will find someone who…fills you.

Forgive childhood.

Forgive this moment.

Forgive men and even some of the women.

Forgive the cracks in your skin. Also known as scars. Or crashes of age.

Forgive all the silence in you. When you’re really ready, all of your noises will emerge and create the most exquisite soundtrack you’ve ever heard. Get your batteries charged. You’ll want to listen for a long, long time.

it is not yet the end.

for K who lives beneath the moon.

“Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it is not yet the end” (Patel)

 

Nothing is thicker than love. That molasses you drip into metal bowl for the cookies you make this time of year does not compare.

The sky drenched in fog that forgets you need a light to get to the end of the block and causes you to lose track of space is not even close.

The layers that live beneath our steps that go from hot to cold to hot to mold and matter and all those animals, still alive, that arrived centuries ago. All that rock and soil, still not thicker than love.

Try to push it back. Challenge your stamina. Force it into padlocked closets, so dark that it is difficult to remember what really lives there.

Remember that you do not need another human to help you to feel this. Go without coffee for five days. Then, wake. Pour water and watch the bubbles heat. Measure the grounds and rain it into french press. Drown in heat. Sit. Wait. Drink with oat milk. That feeling is love too.

Sit inside a home that although locked and warm, is thin enough to remind you of the sirens and screams outside. Unhook your restricted thoughts. Call everything a poem, even your screams. Even the gashes of tears that interrupt your face. Each cough or sneeze. Each twitch of bone. Poems. Love.

Put on your shoes at 4am. Admit that you are still asleep and you can call this an interruption of night. Fill your skin with fabrics that are heavy enough to fix your nudity. Walk outside. Not too far, but enough to get a perspective of sound. Admit it is colder than you desire. Wrap scarf from neck around head and ears. Look up. Yes, like that. You know this as moon, but call it something else. Just catalogue how its thrill makes you feel. Count enough stars to make you lose track of the chill. Do not photograph this. Do not tell anyone of this late night encounter. Just feel it. Breathe in this entrance of genderless satisfaction. This feeling is detached from politics or trauma. It just is.

Stay away from others for awhile. Or. Move toward the ones that remind you of all this.

It is not yet the end

gratitude.

these clouds, a collision of applause

maple walnut peanut butter

my dad

moleskine notebooks and extra fine black ink pilot pens

sundays

modern love

crown street home

kazim ali’s poetry

rebel

my skin

sobriety

wrists without serration

u.s. postal service

august

those warriors of gender and the ones I am still searching for…

music MAkers

coffee

my soul sister

the moon!

the scent of campfire

my ability to poem

poetry teachers nyc

pancetta bruscetta rivera herman (I and II)

that fallen tree against the lake at prospect park

employment

the contagion of elephants

collaborative art forms

yann tiersen

hard-working lungs

a resilient mind

an appetite

when I am [able to be] present

moving on

white rice

eleanor

farmer’s markets

community gardens

NY Times

creative circle

C & Peggy

found he(art)s

semi-colons

magic

dis/en/t/angle.

Call my chest a slow-motion tangle of inflation.

Walk backwards in order to remain longer.

Give up adjectives for a year and settle for verbs and pronouns. You swim. You gather. You kiss. You handle.

The moon will continue to gorge on sky. It will fluctuate in weight and one must ask themselves what all this has to do with them.

Imagine falling in love with a human, rather than what defines them as such. [to see/ love beyond gender of genitalia]

Gather yesterday’s history to remind you not to return.

Call all of this research.

Somewhere not too far, you will find someone who does not require an apology for your past. When this human is found, do not not not let them go.