More Poetry

I. No one wants to see or hear anyone in pain, and this is why I so often feel that it is better that I leave this world, but a love filled anger relocates my soul in my body and I am made whole again, and I walk as a tempest would walk in an incomplete pattern, a sacred grid-iron path. And I wish that my life were a little more straightforward, but I do not know how to march like most people shall or would prefer, rather, I walk in circles, following my own steps, being led by no one other than myself.
II. I am kind of content being alone, I do more of my own thinking, I let my mind wander up into the corners of my room, my imagination pokes fun at itself, I endure my own riddles response. The flys are buzzing outside my window right now in a rectangular pattern. I really love where I am living right now. The more I write to myself the more I like the anger, tears, pain, and wisdom that I find within my own experience. I pull and tug at another voice stuck within me for so long. I free a new soul.
III. Hectic days and dreary nights when you push everyone you love away and outside the boundaries of your life, because no one understands the pain, the remorse, the grief inside of my body. And they always have their reason and their truth, as to why my body and my mind acts and sounds this way. They look, but cannot feel. They observe, but dare not touch. And so my love, the love that needs, desires expression, is empty, lost, unfounded. I feel, but am not touched. I think, but do not know. And so I go on like that in a mind that still dares to question, possessed by my questions, I only speak and can not talk, I ask, but can not respond. And so I go on like this with myself over and over again day and night. My dreams are nightmares that haunt me, and my glance is cold and lost somewhere during the day.
IV. Watching the rapture of shadows against geometric world, I slowly sink, my mind towards a more distant world. A world that is felt through a gaze, where all forms lose their definition, where functional purpose melts away, and material sensibility travels down a slide into oblivion. Only I remain, alone, feeling nothing. Meaning moves away from me, as time becomes a statue I shatter.
V. I live in a desert where time is lost in between the shifting shadows of light on sand that moves across the valley uncontrolled and free of any physical barrier. Aimless motions stir the flatlands into a ceremony of timelessness, and wonder. The winds search for a place of resistance, wanting desparately a sense of time and place in the vast empty space, where nothing lives or dies, but remains a safe distance from all of Creation.
VI. You are the wind, the sand, the earth, the sun acting in unison. You embody both the motion and spirit of the land. Yet you watch all the elements proceed in the distance as if one had nothing to do with the action of the other. A play of mute actors and actresses never casting glance or having sight of the others who make the entire scene possible. A play of uncommitted objects and disciples that have no God, but their singular selves. They stand alone and ignore the context of their experiences. They do not feel one another or see one another, or even act as though they need one another. Like a parade of cars racing through the night on a freeway, locked and buckled in moving space, guided by each mile measured on a map of destination points that have no conscious configuration. Here streetlights seduce a vulnerable mind to appreciate, not question, being fragmented and dispossessed of life. This is the world we live in.
VII. You can’t escape, your images and dreams will soon fade, and you are faced by a wall on one side with loneliness and despair standing, remaining behind you with open arms waiting to grab your body and mind and beat you senseless for even daring to think of climbing over that wall. But you turn to them and tell them loudly, although afraid of the physical blows that threaten you every time you try to stand up, “I want to tear this wall down, not merely climb over it, and then you will be flattened as well.” But they take me, fasten me to the ground, I am knocked unconscious with each blow. I am blinded by fear and tears that I can not release. I look up and see blurry images pounding away at an object. My body is over there somewhere. I am both lost and confined. My mind has no body and my body has no mind. I am not dead. I crawl about in circles trying to get away from the pain. I do not know what it is like to live without the fear of being beaten and rejected by my wishes to know a different life. They have won for now, I do not wish to write anymore, my life is meaningless, the wall has fallen on me and covered me in rubble.
VIII. Now my mind travels back to the present, where I am at now, although I went off to college unlike most of my high school friends, I am the one sitting in the Welfare Office hoping to get a check dispersement, while my old friends went off and have married men and work. With a double income they have financial security, more than I could ever hope to have in my life, because financial security ties one to motives that I find useless and boring, at least this is what I would like to think. The fact is that I have a mind and emotions that make it difficult for me to work and be in the world. If I had only my race and class and gender to overcome, but I have a physical disability, and people like myself are not and will never be valued by this culture.
IX. Today the people who sit outside this lofty government building wait for meager ‘handouts’, and they share my condition, we talk to ourselves because the world has cast us aside as useless creatures to be put on Welfare, kept off the streets and put in overcrowded jails and mental institutions. At least we have ourselves, and I am beginning to recognize the faces from the many times I have been in and out of the waiting room at County Mental Health. This man steps across from me and tells me that I am pretty, his words are slurred, I know this man from last year, he’s one of us, struggling through life like me trying to stay out of institutions that steal your soul away from you slowly, deviously, and with care.
X. Surrounding all of my thoughts, reflections, and the ongoing activities of a government office that is very much tied to the clock – The day is beautiful, the air is clean, and clouds are not colored brown like they are in the L.A. basin. The wind gently caresses my face and I feel loved by the world. I do not feel alone, the seasons move me to respond to what I feel all throughout the day. I am alive. I am a human being and the social world, this culture, no matter how hard it trys can not take away this fact of my existence. People around me are still smiling and laughing at one another, with their physical bodies intact, I don’t see blood and charred life forms lying on the ground, the world is only partially at ware here.
XI. I live in a forest, and I unplug my telephone, or I cling to people for life when I’m on the telephone, because I so often lose the touch, and I do not feel myself anymore, and I look out and see objects, and my body is just another object. I loose the sense of feelings, and my mind leaves blurred memories and images in the thin air, and colors surround me and send me to sleep. I wish that my life was just another dream, but I wake up every morning, and I think, and most of the time this is all I can do, and I hope that I will live through the day, and most of the time this is what I do, and sometimes I get excited because the pain goes away and I can get up and walk, enjoy food in my stomach, and remember the one day I was able to love.
XII. The books, they surround me and tell me to create something new. I listen with tears in my eyes as the world decays and rots, digesting itself, and not listening to the pain of the people that cry out searching for relief, only to seek death instead of life. Spirit, spiritual, what does this mean for me? Dedication, I want to dedicate my life to writing, to feeling, to seeing what is not there and could be, like love gently nestled in between the physical pangs of hatred that burn the lining of ones’ stomach. Why haven’t we learned from the ancient tragedies written so many years ago? We have deceived ourselves, and now the sun and moon rise without notice.
XIII. My feelings and thoughts are not easily separated. Words should always express a passionate attachment to life, and the forms of expression that are led by thought. From this vantage point I travel the pages of a discourse, bringing my life and my experience. The neatly printed letters on a page can only have meaning if I allow them to penetrate the surface of the dialogue, to take form, to rise from the dead.
XIV. Relationships in my life have always been about ownership, control, and expectation. Thus, I am like coffee being brewed and leaving the filter. I choose to take on my own form. I am like liquid in this world, a liquid made from this world and by this world. I am freedom.
XV. I left God and religion at the age of fourteen and made my sexuality my prayer and mass. I worship the perspiration that falls from my body and I listen to the hymns of my breath, while Communion takes on different forms. And so I feel holy and no longer feel the need to go to church. And so I lie alone in my worship, like the little girl who spent so much time alone in empty churches, watching the sun, travel through stained glass windows, and approach me like a spotlight, as I kneel in a church pew.
XVI. I say that power can not be easily taken, or known, or found, but built out of what already exists.
XVII. I touch my belly, soft, and empty. I feel knots in my lower abdomen. Blood will untie this stress that pulls inside of me in a few days. Now I want someone that I trust and love to search deep inside of me, my body and my soul. This is my desire, but not a possibility right now because I am afraid of allowing love to enter me, when all that had entered before was painful. I believe that someone could learn to touch me gently, and maybe I could risk feeling again, coming back to my body, knowing that death always waits for me instead of leading me away from the world of people. I do not know at the moment when we will meet again. All I know is that my mind is like an untamed animal. I am pawing at the ground and I prowl at night in the dark, moving up and down the same path in silence. Along the way I find images, I yearn to be a person whom can form words to build bridges of understanding between what is natural and unnatural in the world.
XVIII. Strapped by words and held by abstractions that ignore the swaying edges of my experience, Michel Foucault is a swing in a playground. But I walk into the playground and nothing moves as I examine the slide and the handle bars, not until I put my hand into the sand does the wind blow it through my fingers and onto the face of a child grimacing and bringing to life my surroundsings. What can I offer this brilliant scholar in response? I can go nowhere and remain unnoticed. I have a fiction and form that surrounds my presence. Have all the tunnels already been carved?
XIX. When I read Foucault I hear a familiar melody, violently torn by the beating of village drums. This is his response to what he calls: “…a cetain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual”. I hear this faint echo, “Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, established it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.” I wonder whether or not his voice is projected to those who walk on the ground rather than remain beneath it? He who chooses neither to lead or follow, acts like a slide projector in our minds. Create your own personal image and enter the portrait. This is all that he asks of us: Leading ourselves away from grounded images and theoretical models of what was designed as the perfect model of progress in service of humanity. He also says, you can only know someone when you have created a knowledge of them, when you constitute, and try to control their being. To say that you know someone is to put their free spirit in a cage and turn away. Hence the question must follow, how do you know someone? Rather, why do you choose to hold onto a certain way of knowing? This follows that we are of afraid of trying to know one another because we must let go of fixed ideas, of moral standards that judge and displace what is really important.
XX. I say:”What does it mean to really know another human being? There are many forms of cultural expression and communication.” We must also draw on different parts of ourselves in different circumstances. Is it possible to ever know another human being? Or do we stifle the many spirits within, by claiming that we know that person, that individual. Must we reach our potentials in this manner, by trespassing all that we are, in and through each momentary thought and action? I do not think so! Rather we must live our lives by what is unknown, like a naked foot stepping through the ground of an unexplored forest to feel the pleasure and painful sensations that run from the ground, through our bodies, filling our minds with knowledge. To take another step, unlike the march of a soldier, without force, but with compassion, for life is sacred.