Cactus Fruit (final)

A thing of curiosity
Which I’ve come to call mind
And play
Which I’ve come to call soul
A child
He approached the thorny reaches
of the cactus patch
Tiny cracked feet
Dusted red
Fragments of canyon walls
Taking flight and clinging
Onto one foot
And the other
His soft hands reaching
For drops of late summer suns
Caught and forgotten
Amongst her stinging needles.
Two steps closer.
Pricked
Three steps shuffling back
You could not have expected him, then
To have grasped the significance of the act
with
Hands too small to hold it
and
Skin too delicate to reconcile,
Hunger too deep to efface.
One foot.
The other.
I would come to you again
My mother
With hands that could uproot you
If gloved
But ungloved and bare I come
Naked in your dense spaces
Expecting lessons of thorns
But plunging within you
Finding myself pierced and bleeding.
My body confronted in reds and browns
My contortion pursuing your corruption
I wrenched her from your teeth
And knew her
In a moment
Flesh aching, Eyes watering, Feet blistered and cracked
I knew her
Delicate in my hand
Her torn flesh flashed as I had imagined it
But from it flowed not tears but water
And from her skin, not sweat but salt and scent
And in her movement existed not dance
But fiber and weight
And our lovemaking lay in your belly
Bloodied hands stretching upward
Offering silent prayers
Of wholeness:
Purple and red

Christmas Eve

I stretch my palms wide
Opening the spaces between finger and thumb
Finger and finger
Stretching the webbing taught
Until I can see the reflected light of the street lamps
Shining red through my flesh
I can feel the slow evaporation of sweat off my skin
The gentle cooling sensation
Even as the sweat reformulates
In the dense humidity of high Brazilian summer.

The night is alive
Even as we sit
Waiting for the bus which will take us back home
The tambores, e berimbau, e agogo ring heavily in my ears
Reminding me that the celebration has begun
That from this Christmas Eve
Through the new year
And even up through the rise and fall of carnaval
This city will be alive and throbbing

Beautiful descendent bodies
Pulsating to the rhythms of their blood and their profits
The dark bodies waving in giant masses
To the sound of Portuguese lyrics and African rhythms
Guzzling down beer and cachasa
Whizzing through the air on their own brand of magic dragon
Ahhh, Salvador, minha Bahia!

I pull my belongings closer
Figures are running towards the bus stop
A man pursued by two armed guards
A policia
They catch him on the curb in front of the bus stop
He is being held with his arms behind his back
He is dark and defiant
The sweat runs off his brow
Like most of Bahia, he is small, but muscular
In his defiance, his muscles seem to bulge from tattered clothing
He did not take the woman’s things
He was afraid and ran
But another boy had taken them
He saw them go
The guard does not buy it
The boy’s arm is twisted backwards
He hunches
Disfigured by the force of the guard’s hold
His indignation rises as he is drarwfed
He struggles
He did not take it
His mouth filled with spit
Spit intended for the face of his oppressor
If he could only struggle free enough to turn so far as to take aim
His struggle is only met with more force
Pain flashes across his face
In a moment he remembers his younger brother
How will he work with a malformed arm
How will he set it if it should break
His eyes cloud
“Naooooooooo, ja vai quebrar meu brazo, vai quebrar!”
He screams in anguish
His arm creating an acute angle
No longer with his back but now with his neck
Screaming
Kneeling
Doubled in pain
His face transformed
He looks about wildly
Broken
The officer kneels into his back
My teeth grind as I can hear the tissue tearing his arm
And in his face is the face of a child
12 or 13
Hungry
Impoverished
Perhaps having wanted to take the said woman’s purse to feed himself
But not having done it
Tears run down his cheek
He lies crushed at the foot of the pigmentocracy
That is the Brazilian social structure
That is this capitalist social structure
A dark man in the wrong place
A dark man who feeds himself off the tourists
Who gorge themselves on his culture
And his way of life
Leaving him to steal from their mouthes what is rightfully his
To steal from their mouths what is rightfully his
Suddenly the police realize the presence of the tourist spectator
The scene is removed from sight
Excused by a sudden change of heart
They “believe” the boy and all is well
The music swells around us again
The tourists steal the vacant seats of the bus stop
With their cultural bounty
Sarongs, post cards, and feathered headdresses
It is once again Christmas Eve
Mas ja quebro
It is already broken.

Boys

Boys are dumb.
Ugghhh
“Y’know?”
Should I?
You use one and a half words
To fill in the gaps of your
Emotional illiteracy
Leaving me to hope
That you really know how to care

Attempts at straight faces
Make me think you
No more than a child
Wanting to be a man

But you hold your heart
Like a football
Clutching so tightly
That the pressure remains at fifty
And tired rags make
Your victory dance a farce

You would think your
Heart was a brick thrown into your chest
Or some giant ninety-nine cent
inflatable rubber ball
Speckled florescent
With which you are more
Confused thanCompleted
Endlessly trying to force it
Through a tiny metal hoop

All I needed was an honest answer
How do I look?

Boys

I guess, y’know
Two words designed to
Fill the holes of your emotional illiteracy
One and a half make me
Responsible for feeling for both

Is this the price I pay for loving boys?
Deprived of conversation and affection
You withdraw into silent sterility to save face

Brown boy, your masculinity endangered by six foot one, AF
Trimmed yourself with thick soled shoes and spikey hair
Anything to add an inch

In the attempt to be a man you’ve deflated your heart
And alone you reach the endzone
Brown and white rags making your victory dance a farce

Squeezing too tight you destroy
That which you are only meant to hold

Saddest Poem

This was meant to be the saddest poem in my book
The one that would leave me feeling fresh
The one that would get it all out,
Scream out your name in excorcism,
The one that would clear my emotional sinuses
So long clogged with liquid green-brown tears of self-pity and villification
This was meant to be the poem that would sneeze so loud and hard that I would never need another night of inhibitory intoxication to sleep peacefully again
The sneeze that would free me from the white paper trail beside my bed
Leading nowhere but you
The sneeze that would let me go out into the bright spring air,
Eyes no longer swollen shut, nose red, voice lost
No, I would breathe in purple as deep as I could and be left nowhere amidst the branches of a mountain laurel counting its petals and laughing that I ever thought it mattered whether I ended on a loves me not,
This was meant to be the winter poem to precede that spring,
But I am tired of writing sad poems.

I am tired of writing poems that wallow in their own self pity and repetition of the abuses rendered me, rendered the world as if people were more motivated to action by tears than by anger, by memory than by promises, by compassion than by disregard.
If you want another sad poem from me,
I will wait for you at the bar
Because that is where I have exiled you.
Only there do I wish I could still cry over you
Exorcise those feelings I have towards you
Scream your name in the night
And pray to God for daylight
But country music only carries you so far before it starts crying red white and fucking burn and alienates you to watch him touch her as if he did not want you
Conventions of relationships get old and, dare I say, trite when you hold them so close in that lonely extra long twin bed at night
When exams and papers crowd the door, slipping themselves silently under and waxing your floor
The once welcome carpet now ice, keeping you in bed through snooze after snooze after snooze
You see, as useful as it may have been once upon a time, to cry and bewail our manifold sins together
To work through the consequences of inconsequential gestures motivated by stress and stifling proximity
That shit gets old and there just ain’t the time
And Friday nights in college are sometimes just meant to fuck

You see this was meant to be the saddest poem in my book,
But sadness requires you and my words are just a bit too precious
So, I’ll save them for things that might matter someday
I’ll save them for reliving nights in Mexico
Long walks to and from raunchy clubs where straight boys stand on tables and in broken English sing Shania
I’ll save them for the tiny girl holding such a large cup so thirstily you thought she might drown
I’ll save my words for recalling injustices against my mixed parents in the bordertowns where things don’t mix so smoothly
I’ll save my words for recounting hometown football games and high school dances
i’ll save them for talking about who I am, without you,
and you know, I’ll save them to scream someone elses name in the night,
Not for loss but because I’m fucking about to come

You see, this was supposed to be the saddest poem in my book
But then I realized how sad that really was, and how easy
I am tired of writing sad poems because I am tired of being sad and not angry
I am tired of filling emotional experience with tears and not with laughter
I am tired of living memories and thereby pre-empting life
I am tired of acting like you mattered.

Thunderstorm

I look forward to a time when my eyes will speak rhythms
My hands will smell fresh baked bread before they can see it
and dancing feet will compose volumes on the sidewalk
While my ass reads someone else’s rhyme on a park bench

No one will speak clearly, none distinctly, none with singular style
But music will swell from each to each, a soothing summer shower of sound
And together we will tear into eachothers thunderheads
Evoking shudders to shake a world long forgotten unto itself

Travel

Malika opened her mouth to speak and lost her tongue
No sound came out, but colors danced between her teeth
She had seen the world in nursery rhymes and backseat bass
And the world had not been so simple
While syllables gave it skin
She could not speak it
And her music could only echo my hearts own memory
Of ruins alight with orange suns
Crystal pools of silk and pebbles
And children’s fingers pulling at my pockets.

Closet

The American dream was quiet when I stepped through the door
He didn’t tell me a story or make promises
But cowered in the corner as I stumbled about in the darkened wardrobe
Trying on my mother’s dresses
What was I looking for and why was it so cold?

Kim

Kim took the stage like a donkey piñata strung from an old mesquite. Precariously. Barraged by the abuses of the world she exploded into bits of candy and colored paper, sweet to the taste but sweeter still to the eye and rested not a moment in the grass before she was grabbed up by greedy hands and shoved into hungry mouths, indiscriminately mixed with bits of dirt and fallen leaves. Kim was an American poet. Speaking truth she opened herself up to be consumed hoping that divided twelve ways her body might offer something to those who would be quickest to face the still swinging bat.

Morenci, AZ

Too many mothers beg forgetfulness visit their babies
For me to recall with such urgency the shadow of my father’s skin.
Were it not for bronzed hands that labored in copper mines
Hoarding turquoise fragments home for birthdays
The scrapes on my elbows and knees would have scarred far darker
And my memory would find cause to speak

San Antonio, TX

The American dream is the city from the suburbs
Looking down a
Long expanse of road I crest a hill
And amidst the yellowing oranges
Of melting clouds
I can make out the familiar skyline
The Tower of the Americas, the Marriot,
The orange and green building whose name I’ve never known.
In the distance, it’s always midnight
The city completely dark, unknown,
While heaven dances about it, radiating life.
A hole in the sky, shaped like humanity
Waiting to be filled.
From the drivers seat of a white Montana
I know the waiting is for me.

Britney

The other day I was chatting with my good friend
And he let me know that Britney Spears had recently been canonized
In a low cut, high thigh midnight
She had solemnly proceeded down the isle for the first time
And hands on each shoulder received the rewards of her labor
Our once virgin, now saint
It made sense I suppose, from hard work she had ridden the mediocrity of her voice and her music, a perfect fit for the mediocrity of American taste.

Breaking the Silence

About three years ago there came a time
when the spaces of my life
became too wide
for me to hold myself together
without language.
three years past I realized the silence
around my heart
was constricting to the point of foreclosure.
Three years past I took a boy in my arms
and laid kisses on him that drove the sun from the sky
in shame that she could never offer enough warmth to replace my affection.
But you know, this is not a coming out poem.
Silence pervades our society like lactose in milk that lets some rest quietly telling us to take it for our health, while 70% of the world’s population has to shit it out under duress.
Silence is a parasite feeding on the underbelly of our consumptive complacency
Silence is not t-shirts and quiet nods
Not sign language and notes passed
Silence is fat girls with pgtails who don’t have words like hegemonic societal expectations
It is underpaid workers with silences named Joaquin and Kike who must be provided for
Silence is 2 cars to every household and 4.5 pounds of trash per capita
It is wedding bands and don’t ask, don’t tell
It is queer eyes for straight guys and my face nowhere on the television screen
It is complaining silently to paper, drying eyes on sleeves long enough to hide the marks
Silence extends beyond the harassment and violence visited upon us as a community to our own inability to ask and tell
To gather the courage, tell the story, stand together, leave this place and continue to tell the story that will break the silence that will free the story that we’ll go on telling to break the silence.
What will you do?

I Hate Queers

A quick exposition:
Fifteen years ago a flier went out entitled
Queers read this
I hate straights
And so began the queer movement
The unnaming
The reclaiming of a humanity that denied normativity in order to redefine itself as honesty
Queer lay a place on the horizon, a place beating blindly beneath sheets into the silent forgetfulness between your thighs
Hoping that there lay salvation
But LGBT meant that QIA meant MIA and queer would be its posterchild
And queer would call itself all but would turn on the light and expose the wads of kleenex on the nightstand and the silence of my desire for a little more than acceptance
You see queer became somebody’s brand name
Somebody white and muscular and oh so secular
And buying out the competition he forgot to give good notice
And queer became rotten in my hands



Fourteen plus years ago
I saw your name on a street lamp
I read your name in a backroom stall
I heard it cried from angry lips
And in a moment that knew you better than I alone could
I called you home

I called you home
As an admission that the future could never be here
I called you home
As an admission that you were not here (nor was I)
That refractory raindrops of papers carrying your name
Would never be birds of peace
But tunneling ants of forgetfulness
Blind and dumb but on their way to something deeper

You see fourteen plus,
Queer read like candied clouds
And like blinded red ants that couldn’t name your fingertips or your hair I knew your scent for a polar wind
Leading me to a horizon whereupon
There were hearts that spoke names that no one could pronounce and no one needs pronounce for in hearts of such depth there was room for silence
A self-imposed silence of queerness and the reclaimed voice of existence
For in the heart and voice of queer was the heart and voice of my own two hands beating the drum of my desire to the muddied faintness of your softening face
And your dumb reply, a whispered I love you

With you
I inhaled queer so deeply
That often I forgot to let breathe
And let dissipate to others
The freshened air of my own exhaled queer
To let flow my forgetfulness, my identity, my own symmetry
To contribute my own memory in pursuit of something better
For often its said that whats good is whats good for the most
And the part means that something’s in need of revision and revision breathes honest redemption of spaces forgotten, ommissions left rotten and tears stagnated

But
You forgot to exhale
You forgot to breathe freely
To let the air flow from each to each
Swooping, shimmering showers of song and of silence
You inhaled our collective air and became queer unto yourself
And there is something in me that doesn’t love such a wall
But that knows its roots
And ingested breathes swallowed are gas
And force up only half digested truths of other half digested creeds
And queer read LGBT means MIA, means QIA unqualified
And tired
And queer is not a mask, nor a name but a place and a hope
An everextending theory of beginnings
An unwritten mo(u)rning song for things and times unconceived
and illconcieved
To find their birth
Unforgiveness, as unapologetic as newness and leavings

And now you look to me as unfamiliar hands look upon a typewriter
Expecting it to spell out to you a story
But queer is only keys for your experience
And hands make bloody paper and clog the feeder
For queer is nothing of truth but everything of possibility
And everything of possibility is everything to uncreated
And clay is all that I am
And I cannot forgive you
Queer in blurred letters on mangled hands
I cannot forgive you
Queer deflected from futures and spaces
I cannot forgive you
Queer on t-shirts and business cards, on seventeen and HBO
With neat edges and riotous origins
Queer with hands and feet and arms and legs
Queer with an s scrawled upon its tail to bound in its future
And cement it to your given name
I cannot forgive you

Bisexual, intersexed, gay person of faith, transgendered, heteroflexible, mariposa, transvestite, pedarist, prostitute, porn star
Hear this
Read this
I hate queers

And everyday you wake up a living, breathing, functioning human being you commit an act of rebellion

You take one step closer to a place with a name so sacred it cannot be co-opted

Stand firmly, speak slowly, breathe deeply, live honestly
and create the possibility of home.

Suenos Americanos

I walked into the store of self-improvement the other day
And ordered up one Sueno Americano
The sales rep went back in the back and brought out a size extra small
Sure my boyfriend was hunting through ladies low rise and singing Shakira
But did i ask for latex

As I reached to take the shirt
It dropped from his hands
And unfolded on the tile floor
Lying there it looked so small and unimpressive
Half legible letters printed on thick red cotton
But the words promised so much
With dollar signs poiting skyward to clouds that would embrace you in a single national culture
Like sneeches with stars upon thars I imagined myself vested in black surrounded by similar promises on green backed wings in mists of normalcy and baby blue success
And pulled it from the floor

The changing rooms were cramped with people trying on blue and red, rotating before mirrors long plastered with magazine covers and full size movie posters
Ooo girl, that shirt too tight
O boy, you could fit a family of seven in that one
opening the only empty stall I step inside
The mirrors already tell me how good I look with eyes like Tom and a chin like Brad
But, if memory serves, my skin was not so light

TEAR DOWN POSTERS

Thats better
Or maybe a little worse
But hell at least its honest

TAKING OFF SHIRT AND PUTTING OTHER ONE ON

Alright (EYES CLOSED EXCITED TO SEE)

OPENING EYES
is this how its supposed to fit?
I feel so exposed, so uncomfortably suffocated
My arms bare up tp hair and my nipples like buttons
My shoulders terribly slanted and my roll exposing imperfection
Is this how its supposed to go
As an out brown male is this the extent of mi sueno Americano
Maybe if I stretch it...goes back up to here


Like a knife
The tag juts out of my back

Thank you for shopping Broken Dreams
As a proud owner of this Suenos Americanos T
You are entitled to full American cultural social and economic citizenship
That means as long as you wear the shirt, you get the money, the girl, kenny g’s jazz collection, a bucket of bleach, blue contacts, platforms, a penis enlarger and six cases of budweiser. Enjoy!

Warning: keep away from open flames and wear with like colors
Gradation of sizes, gradation of benefits

The mirror speaks truly
It fits poorly
In the process of taking it off, the shirt is ripped
I’ll have to pay the price but
with the scraps left over I can make something new

You see
With size small shirts I’ve got so little space to move and explore
With size small shirts my skin is bled pale
My lungs constricted
My voice a breathy, shrieking “he-ey”
With size small shirts I swing my step and I flail my hands
My heart gets compressed and all I need is sex
And if its not sex then its marriage
And foreign babies who will get excellent education with two daddies income
With a size small shirt I’ll have to watch my figure
I’ll stop eating pozole
And have no reason to visit my grandmother
My family will forget
And I will soon
And I’ll move to a city
And I’ll live in the bars
And I’ll watch my face plastered and fetishized on ads for Club Latino and Mocha Night
And in a size small shirt I’ll save my constricted breath from prayer
And only praise the latest line
I’ll karaokize madonna and copy her moves
Cuz size small shirts mean glass cielings and glass boxes
Specimen tables and push pins
Felt boards where your beautiful mariposa wings
Can be prodded and rubbed dry
Of the shimmer powder that lets you fly
And in a size small shirt
There just ain’t room for sky
Cuz here in red and blue
They make them for you
They fit them to you
They charge your name
And unless you make your own
All they got is extra small
Suenos Americanos

Steel

“The sky is made of steel”
He throws in my direction
Across the endless cosnole
A gaze turned blank
Eyes playing on the horizon
He is not with me then
Only a shade of him
A shadow falling into, onto and down over the passengers seat of a 93 camry
No anger in his voice
Nor fear in his observation
Only the bleak exhaustion of mid-semester

“A wonder,” I reply
Wishing
Somehow
Maybe I could be so cold
Maybe, I myself, could turn to steel
Austere and removed
That my blood
Frozen in its place
Might multiply in density
And congeal into unbreakable links of an endless chain
And to that chain
I’d affix my past
Strangle my memories
Set them adrift
Watching them sink to the bottom of a well I so often wish was deeper

But my blood burns hot
It boils between the walls of a heart all too healthy
It simmers the memories
Reviving them in the endless bubbling of evaporation and condensation
It is anything but quiet
Anything but steel
And yet there exists a fear
Fear of a weakness
No knowledge yet
Only fear
And doubt
And perhaps most destructive of all:
Doubt,
Doubt comes in great quantities

“You know, you’re right.”
For it will never be i who am of steel
No, too real for that
Too much mess and confusion
Too many unrighted...
Unrighted markings I have left
I chose this, I chose this
But the sky

Always made of steel
Unbreakable
Unblemishable
But reflecting only what the earth shows it
And maybe I can hope
Perhaps I must hope
In this waiting
That from such a distance
She sees truer

Earth Day 2005

Hi my name is Jason
And I am addicted
I’ve been for years now
But I didn’t realize it until last summer
I was on a college tour with the high school students I work with here at Stanford.
We were out on a lawn having a picnic
Drinking a bottle of water, chilling with the kids
I got to the bottom
The plastic bottle, one of hundreds I would empty in a year
I looked around for a bin, but couldn’t see one anywhere
I began to sweat
Sure it was hot
But where was the familiar green, where was the 4 inch diameter hole
Where was the eternally rotating triangle
A trash can lay right in the center of the lawn
Could I? I could, what choice did I have.
Okay Jason, walk coolly by
Step, step, you’re going to go see Sandra on the other side of the can
Okay now drop it on in
Let go, let go
You can do it
Everyone is watching!
They can see the sweat on my face
The terrifying rattle of plastic on metal
Okay, now keep going
I only got ten feet before spining wildly around
Arms flailing sweat running down my face
My arm shot down into the can and grabbed a firm hold on the bottle
I shoved it into my bag, I would find a bin sometime that day, i would refill it
I am an addicted recycler.
When each of us produces more than 4 and a half pounds of solid waste a day
How can we afford not to be
Each bottle dropped in a trash can another stone in the glittering glass pyramid to which we enslave ourselves and our future
Each flier cast, two hundred each event, 15 events each week
How many post its would that make?
How many stanford students could take their notes solely on the backside of flourescent paper
How many do?
Each bottle discarded, 6 cases each party, 6 parties each weekend
You drunk ass mother fucker,
Three years at a place like this, at least 13 of public education, how many times have you heard that message?
How many times have you heard those three Rs/
And yet, ka-lunk
ka-lunk
bottle after bottle drops into the trash,
covered in vomit and booze who the hell is going to dig those out
We get tired with causes
Get tired with responsibilities
Get numb to the facts we’ve known from age eight
But if not you
Who is policing the trash can
Who is policing the fate of those dailies, those coke cans, those boxes
At an institution like this
Where we pride ourselves on progress
An institution like this
Where we know our society
An institution like this
Where we have responsibility for our future
An institution like this
Where we are educated, tolerant and open minded by definition
We cannot afford to not be addicted to that green can, that blue bin
We cannot afford not to police our own behavior
We cannot afford to set that example and create that future
We cannot afford to not worship the bin which lies in our room and outside our doors
Its so easy, so familiar, but we can’t forget that that little step, that easy extra step is precisely that, step, forward to something better
Addicted? how can we afford to be otherwise?
Use the bin, Stanford.