i, memory

She wanted to hold me. All the time. She wanted to feed me. To dress me. To brush my hair and pet me. She wanted in some part of her she learned from movies and her own mother to be a good influence in my life. To teach me about love and protection. But somehow in a way neither her nor I understood, she became disgusted when I lay in a pool of blood and water between her legs, wrinkled and curled from my nine month gestation, shrieking from the shock of passing through her dark body into a world of light. She became disgusted that day by the way she had been pinned down, her legs held apart, arms grounded, mouth stuffed, eyes left to gape. Her memory had no choice but to reject with primal violence all reflections of that day of her life. But for all its trying, there I was, forcing her to remember. So she had no choice but to reject me, with all the primal violence of her fist and belt and cutting board. I felt that she loved me between welts. But in the end, I was the memory she couldn't kill.

wrinkles wrinkles

Wrinkles, wrinkles.
Such gross manifestations of having lived.
We should sprout flowers for the days that have passed,
not wear time’s stretch marks like scars,
observing our skin’s decay while waiting for life to start.
Lines crawling around eyes trying to shine with youth,
cracking under laughter that makes us hungry for more life.
Wrinkles, grotesque and insincere.
Lies on the surface of our souls.
Cracks in the sweetness of our immortal dreams.

a piece of love

The sea pushes over the rocky shore and makes that sound that she loves. The old man is perched in his usual spot, playing his guitar and singing to himself in Spanish. She pulls her hoodie over her head and asks if she can sit down. He plays a few more songs then says: “Do you like my music?” “Yes, it’s beautiful.” “My wife, she screams at me... 'What is that horrible noise? Stop it, Miguel!’” By the end of his sentence he is strumming the next song. “I come here to get away. I am so hungry for a piece of love.”

home from abroad

It is cramped in here. It is shallow. It is dusty from decades of breathing the same air.
Nothing new grows here. But all that is here remains.
Things die, but they are reborn in the identical form. There is no evolution here.
Words do not travel through space here. They fall into traps that litter the air.
Sometimes a rainbow appears. It is like a mirage, but it is pretty, and we like pretty. No matter it is not real. No matter it will soon disappear.
It is cramped in here. It is shallow.
It is time for dinner. I’m coming, mum. I’m coming.

why i write

I write because the words depend on me to find them. I depend on them to find me, too.

never give up

Walking past a storefront, I see a magnet:
“'Never, never, never give up.’ – Winston Churchill.”
I go inside, pick up the magnet, go to the counter.
I wait.
Three shopkeepers, three people ignoring me.
They walk past me. They talk to each other. They answer the phone. They talk to other people.
I look at the magnet.
“Never, never, never give up.”
Who am I kidding?
I drop the magnet. Pick up my bag. Walk out

fears of our fears

In the confusion of survival it’s hard to decipher where in our drive our fears end and our sincerity begins. Our fears, possessing the sometimes haunted house that we call body, that we call mind. Our fears, so interwoven and hungry that their roots creep deeper into our primal soil while their leaves sprout higher into camouflaged gardens, true cause inconceivable to effect, and so never connected by our consciousness of the daylight hours; kept at bay by wisdom not welcome in the years passing by too fast.

But our third eye knows all, our sixth sense, our heart of hearts, our fears of our fears. An ephemeral finger points a steady hand at unsteady dreams. An unwanted vision deposits wanted clues. An uninvited truth runs its finger down our backs and our hair stands on end. A shiver passes but doesn’t leave. “That cold wind,” we say. Desperation is quite the storm. Brewing deep below the ocean where memories like creatures survive with no light and are sustained with food that would kill anything trying to live life on the surface.

Do you understand what I am saying yet?

Fears of our fears. This is all that can awaken in us the desire to be awakened. Rising like an unforeseen wave to deform sandcastles built too close to stormy waters. Performing a striptease with our gaping neglect of dormant dreams. Neglect revealed through confusion, revealed through epiphany, revealed through tears, revealed through the silence at the end of a day where nothing made sense, and feels like it never will again.