In My Own Words

untitled #618

2011-07-04T01:36:00.000-04:00

What little time I have left to gather my personal effects
I remain undaunted, a flat affect
Left to my own devices I'd lay here silent forever
Left here. Id lay here forever
Yesterdays end and todays begining
A year from now and two months from eternity
Time has no place
Heart stranded; this place is displaced
And all for a touch of your lust
A pull of your cigarette
One for whom food is not enough
A sillouette, a shadow. Lost in the barren darkness
Once again in a mess of my own making- my only friend

wake up and not love me no more

2011-05-11T23:10:00.000-04:00

Hold secrets and remain despondent
The loss of merit then unresponsive
Paint pictures and draft sonnets
Hold the Wicked accountable for sins committed against the heart
Enduring a tainted inception tints our reception resulting in regression
We stand in limbo
The heart beats incessantly like a drum then deep like a bass
Somber is our song and its plays out loudly
We cannot ignore its rhythm
Take in the tempo
Made the eternal error of believing that it could be different
When it is always the same
Still struggling to discern between evolution and change

Loveless Patron

2010-04-21T14:02:00.002-04:00

She looks to me when things aren’t so bright
I gauge her sense of misery
Credence given to the night
We say intermittent goodbyes
Cold Winters marked by harsh betrayal
The band plays out a series of sequential tones
Its melancholy for the sake of being
We rejoice for distance; dichotomy unseen
The last thought of my first love
Beginning of our torrid end
What’s the use of pretending to be friends?
If you cant befriend the ‘me’ of today
Because you hate the person of yesteryear
A loveless patron short on the currency of the heart

the last autumn

2010-02-16T14:54:00.002-05:00

A gust of light cuts through a mostly barren tree, its branches a bleak reminder of what the once were.
The leaves of yester-year break to the ground, in search of surfaces anew
The leaves, they dance and fray, around in the plush dawn air
The oranges, the browns, the yellows and greens
It was the last autumn
The glow of an early day's end cast about through the shed’s peak.
The constant threat of winter loomed closer
A promise never fulfilled
It would be the last gentle breeze
The last morning dew drops on fleeting grass
It would be the last shade drawn
The last hint of allspice
The last evening in by the fire
The last autumn
And the spring before had hope for sovereignty
The summer brought smiles from children
Maybe solace was granted in being spared another New England winter
The last autumn is all we have

i remember it well

2009-11-09T14:13:00.001-05:00

I remember when I was Black, however distant ago it was. The matriarchal society firmly in place, I took a similar stance to my much older counterparts. One of domesticity, of servitude. Yet we were parts of a whole. We were equal. It’s before my concept of love was jaded by despondency. Everything was new and exciting- stimuli to the heart and the mind. I floated upon a cloud. The familiarity both comforted and alerted me. How was I to expand my horizons in a bubble of my own content? How was I going to be multicultural in my own culture? I ignored my irrational fears and focused on what was to be the rest of my life. If its one thing that love has taught me is that even the most passionate of passions do not last long. We became strangers to one another. Despite efforts to revive the relationship we had built, she outgrew me and I became docile. My only way to love her was to ignore her. This infuriated her till no end. Love it’s not without its irony. I remember when I was Black.

I remember when I was Latino. The sense of pride in the culture is like nothing I’d ever experienced. The sense of identity of an entire group of people rests on its ability to remain true to its culture. I personally think assimilation is inescapable in America; it is in the clothes we wear and the burgers we eat. However, if anyone could fight off the invasion they could. I became a stranger to myself, a minority within a minority. There was new food to be eaten and a language to be learned. Customs were foreign to me. This was multicultural, this was expanding my horizons, I thought. At what point does cultural exploration become “just culture”? Am I the assimilationist? While the thoughts never occurred to me, not consciously, there was a side of me that knew I would never be totally accepted. I don’t know if I fought this or let it take over me but it worked itself out in the end. When the love dissipates, there is no where to go but away. We said our long goodbyes and life was forever changed. I remember when I was Latino.

I remember when I was White. I remember being meek and apologetic. I remember wanting to be the “model citizen” as to restore some balance of what a perceived so many in my culture had upset. “The one shinning example of culture and class”. Very early on, however, I realized I didn’t want to be that. “I am what I am” as Popeye famously said. It turns out that I was indeed what I was. I didn’t want to be her token and she didn’t want to be mine, or so I had hoped. It’s easy to put your life into the box others think you should be in. That look of bewilderment and wonder, as if we are all assigned to a race (and gender) and that is the way it should be. We existed just how we did and that was enough for both of us. For a while. Eventually the curse of love rears its ugly head and the honeymoon period ends and all that is left is despair and agony. I remember being White.

In reality, what I remember is parts of a whole. I remember love and what I thought it to be at very particular times in my life. Race is an illusion. Culture is merely a semblance of order. We are who we are and nothing defines us more than our experiences. I remember when I was in love and what I thought it meant. My understanding has shifted with time, not races. With understanding and not culture. With people and not the nationalities they represent. The true impression left on me from love lost is that the idea of love is just that: an idea. Just a random assortment of customs and delirium sought to gain control over another person.

When someone says “I love you” what they are really saying is “I really like the way you make me feel.” Just like the druggie turning tricks on 110th street, once the drugs wear off, in this case, the feeling, all that’s left is despair-usually followed by looking for that next “high”. We have trained ourselves that love is the ultimate in feeling and emotion. Since we were young, we learn that you want other people to love you and to be loved by others. This is servitude masked in emotion. Deception hidden by repetitively flawed thought. The concept of love knows no cultural or race-related boundaries. It seeks to destroy you. I remember when I was Me.

miles on the whim of adventure

2009-10-26T10:36:00.004-04:00

Public transportation is fascinating. It is one of the last remaining places where strangers are forced to cohabitate. To coexist in all of their glory and hatred, fear and discontent towards one another. Think about a large passenger vehicle traveling along a road, picking up randomness throughout the community. Any and everyone can talk and express themselves about anything. The young and old, the black and the white, the weak-willed and strong minded. They all ride the bus. I am often more perturbed than enlightened. Probably speaks more to my character while at the same time, the environment can be too much for the thinking man.

The overweight black woman across from me talked about how she managed to stop doing drugs and now works with a job coach at her local Stop and Shop. The young women in the back of the bus talk about their plans to beat up a class member for “Fucking with my man.” The older gentleman squished in the seat next to me hoots and hollers at a younger woman as the bus passes by. The two Japanese women talk back and forth in their native tongue, probably about how decrepit American transportation is and how they can’t wait to get back to home. It was there we all sat, this moving heterozygous mixture of cultures, beliefs, and ideas- all trying to get to some place else.

The bus finds a way of finding my particular set of peeves and extenuating the limits of my ability to endure them. It stopped to let people on and off. Many people get on, including a young Mexican couple and a twenty-something black woman. Two black women in the back begin to discuss their childhood together. “You know me, I have never been that type. You know me girl!” I hate when people say you know me or you know what I mean. Then someone starts popping gum. Not just popping gum, but popping gum. I couldn’t think of anything more inappropriate at the moment than rudely smacking on gum in the middle of a crowded bus. Despite the hum of the diesel engine and the general murmur of the passengers, I could hear that gum snap snap snap to a rhythm akin to Chinese water torture.

A shifty forty something (a hard earned forty-something) black man began to talk to the bus driver about politics and how he can’t find work but his boy Obama is handling things. One older woman chimed in from the middle of the car: “mmm hmmm, I know that’s right!” The man, now with an audience, switched to sports, and on to other nonsensicals. The driver never replied, but the man was undaunted. He cackled when he thought he made a relevant point or said something funny. Lack of an answer doesn’t necessitate silence. I made a note to myself.

The bus trip itself caused my mind to set adrift. To think about the origin and the destination. The bus left from the main hub, located in arguably the poorest most populated city in Connecticut. It went down the coast, each town becoming more affluent and highbrow, insisting upon insisting upon itself, if it were possible. From early model Honda Civics and Oldsmobiles to vintage model Mercedes and corporate BMW 750i. Here are people less than 30 minutes apart from one another who live everyday like a vacation, compared to wishing for one. Oh how the other half lives.

The Common lyric came to mind: “While white folks focus on dogs and yoga/the people on the low-end trying to ball and get over.” I begrudged no one of success and leisure. The people on this mobile blight had the same dreams. Many would never be reached, but they could see it from their windows, partially blurred with advertisements, of course.

nothing new under the sun

2009-10-21T09:16:00.000-04:00

I have officially entered the blogosphere. My resistance held up for so long because I insisted that I did not want to be “one of those people.” You know the type: living their lives online, crying about their problems for the world to hear or sharing every insignificant detail of their life: “Yesterday I went to the store and got a milkshake. It was awesome.” I live my life for the sole purpose of not becoming a cliché. How can I provide a unique take on my experiences without falling victim to bowels of the internet? You can’t. As the poet Nascir Jones once said, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” People often fail to realize that their very personal, very private once-in-a-lifetime experience has been relived several times but many people in that exact same way. Soon we will all become the cliché to the cliché- the living embodiment of that which we disdain. Perhaps there are no new experiences but only new perspectives on those experiences. Perhaps that’s all conjecture too.

Ill try to post relevant information and share experiences that mean something to someone, but mostly just to me. More than anything, I promise never to talk about an awesome milkshake.