unfurnished dust traveling through tumbleweed

“How you love another person might be a reflection of your relationship to God or the world itself, not to the other person, not to any other person, mother, father, sister, brother. Untrusting? Suspicious? Jealous? Indifferent? Abject? These feelings may be an indication of your larger existential position, hardly personal. And the heart is an organ of the soul, in such a case, not the reverse.”   –Fanny Howe
Reference this as a pilgrimage. Gather up leather knapsack but if such a contraption does not exist, prepare the turquoise one given to you by the one who exhales bits of sea glass. Fill it with spiritual remorse, muted sounds of love-making, womb of peace-offerings, reflection of space. Walk to nearest planet where library of crumbled books beg you to put them back together with spit and ink. If such a location does not exist, walk to nearest bodega and purchase a lemon, plastic bottle of honey, and tweezers to pick out the particles of sad hunting through your organs. How do you walk. With hands playing hide-n-go seek in pockets or do they sway like winter’s wind at your side. Do you hop or hunch. What leads you to look up. Write a haiku about the last time you loved:

similar to traf-

fic light, when one is color-

blind and cannot see

 

All these noises are a reminder of the first one. The first time. Or the third time. And all these feelings were gathered on that walk that lasted two or three decades and in your pockets, you picked up moss, mosquito bites, grey, techniques on how to kiss, several steno pads, half of a butterfly, two addictions, an allergy, almost-death, almost-marriage, exhaust fumes, a newspaper dated tomorrow, an over-priced cellular phone plan, champagne mangoes, a dog, a scar, paper, another scar, someone to eat dinner with, a ring which has since rusted, salt.

Before you got here, you were over there. And over there was (maybe) when you were at your happiest or hungriest. Where you need to be is where you are going. So go there.

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.

---

[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.

“i want it to be yesterday again”

We are all rubber bands. Some of us more weathered than others. The blue one in my hair, which ends a thin braid of red and black, is breaking. It’s come undone just like we all do at one time or another. It has broken, so I’ve tied it into knots–a form of resuscitation–in order to last a little longer. I have a difficult time letting things go: lovers, poems, loops of rubber.

We are pulled at and twisted. We are gathered and we overlap. There is only so far we can stretch before we snap.

We think: 

if I can just bend a little lower 

if I can just arc this body into something more attainable 

I can just pretend this life does not exist / or maybe just this day 

if I can hold onto yesterday 

if I can forget about the leaks and burnt edges 

if I can just remain in this limbo…..

 

We understand: 

we are who we are today because of yesterday

if they could not love you before, a few months (or years)  will not matter

even if you take a hiatus from self-destruction, we are still bombs and the ticking will always remain

 

We reveal:

the beauty of surviving within the war of ourselves

the magic of the utterance of ‘NO’ because even amidst war, our boundaries still exist

we may long for the romanticism of yesterday, but today can offer far more utopian-drenched amour than the faded snapshots of the past

 

 

 

 

o el camino solemne del cuerpo empedrado

The stone is grey and freckled with eastern dust. Kept in pocket, it cuts hips. In hand, it digs into palm. When touched, it enhances the heat of who holds it. The stone is trauma’d. It has been displaced and prefers not to talk about its previous amputations. Do not catalogue, organize or nickname the stone. The stone has been shoved into fires of coordinates that stretch beyond state lines, territories and provinces. The stone has been used as a weapon; it has deflated bone. Notice the blood stains against its minerals. The stone cannot keep a lover; its historical uprooting disallows dialogues on monogamy or the existence of marriage. The stone has been a perch for others, glued into walls, walked over by callused feet, and licked by ocean.  The stone is rib’less and gender’less. Call it androgynous, but the stone refuses to pick a side or sign or stagnant approach to infrastructure. The stone is a danger to itself and others; it has seen too much. Never mention the time the stone ********. Just do not mention that, please. The stone suffers from phantom limb syndrome, though its legs have never existed nor arms or approachable neck. The stone is sad. The stone has no womb, yet yearns to engage in the exercise which publicizes fertility. The stone is without race or religion. It’s color exists from the salt of earth’s breaths and fumes from sun. The stone is still in search of its god. The stone does not conform to any political party and yet this stone is queer. And yet this stone marches for the freedom of others and yet this stone is still. And the stone meditates. And the stone chants. And the stone is in search of its ceremonious existence within its scarred and scared packaging.