What happens to your love when you die?

What happens to your love when you die? 

There’s a universe of love

Shining through my

Skin

Storied by my

Fascia

Stored in my

Fat

Woven by my

Muscle

Calcified by my

Bone

Floating in my

Marrow 

Churning in my 

Capillaries 

Written in my

DNA

{ I love the / my love is

Seen / unseen

Tangible / intangible }

More than words the

Curl of her hair

Smooth shell of his head

Smell of her neck

Scent of his nose

Cross of her ankles

Gristle of his beard

Softness of her cheek

Fuzz on his chest

Her shoulder blades like wings 

How he holds me when I cry

How she needs me when she cries

How he holds me when we kiss 

How I feel when I kiss them

How he watches me when I’m not looking

How they hope I will never die 

How we keep going, hand in hand

The lifetimes we have spent together

And will spend together

The mystery that exists between

The closest of hearts.

When I’m gone 

I will kiss you

With the wind and the rain

I will smell you 

From inside the flowers

I will hug you

When you roll on the grass 

I will rub your feet 

As you walk barefoot on the earth

I will become the water

Stroking your skin 

And the wind that 

Plays with your hair.

I wish I could live forever

But we all leave in our own time

With a string of love trailing

Behind

So that we can find each other 

Again. 

Votes

American

Democracy means

Your vote 

Counts more than mine,

My whiteness  

My able body

My heteronormativity 

Gets more than

Your blackness

Your handicap

Your queer body.

Our justice depends

On the judge

On the house

On the senate

On the votes 

That don’t get counted

On a rapist  

Who controls the votes 

On a country

Built on the 

Displacement

Repression 

Murder

Of people 

Of color. 

…

God

…

Help

…

America. 

Underpinned

Your life is held together a by a series of patterns

Find the thread that’s holding you together

Untangle and rearrange and do whatever

You need with the pieces

But don’t leave them untended

Eventually you will be turned

Inside out

To face the mess 

And the longer you leave it

The longer it will take to fix

And the worst part is that

We don’t have all the time

In the world

We only have 

Today. 

Good luck

I don’t need your validation

To live a beautiful life

My work doesn't need your

Eyes Hearts or Likes

To make it beautiful

I don’t need your good lucks

Your permission

To make it happen

Because I have my truth, and

It belongs to me alone.

A woman's anger

Why wouldn’t women be angry? 

Don’t we have every reason to be? 

Is it safe for us to be angry? 

If not now, when? 

How many more generations?

Until we’re safe to walk alone at night? 

Until drunkenness no longer excuses you for raping us?  

Will you listen when we stop speaking with question marks?

Will you desire us if we cease to self-optimize? 

Will you love us if we promise we’ll always be angry?

We lost count of the ways 

We resent the patriarchy 

For treating us like property

For setting us up to fail

For burning us 

For not believing us

For trying to snuff out our power

Because we can snuff you out

Before you're even born.

You said: someone has balls

When they are brave

But they are a pussy

When they are weak—

It makes us want to do a kick test

To see which one can take a beating.

You minimize our superpowers

Call us weak of mind, evil of spirit  

Ravage, rape, and judge 

Our bodies

Like they are objects rather than the

Miraculous mysterious vessels

That gave you life. 

Only a Guess

“Life is suffering.” - The Buddha

You can never know what's wrong with other people

Guessing is only a guess

Projecting is only a projection

Asking is only a question

Knowing is only a square of knowledge,

What’s wrong is a feeling buried

Alone without the proper order of words.

Maybe you can try

To breathe life into the

Pain

Maybe you can’t talk it all the way

Out

But talking helps anyways

Maybe it’s small enough to be manageable

Though it scares you how it keeps

Growing.

Land of the Shot

God save America, land of the shot

Shoot ‘em wherever you can catch ‘em

Off guard—schools streets marathons malls

Festivals nightclubs churches bedrooms—

It’s a life for a life for a bullet

Wedged in the flesh of a form.

Oh God, in America boys will be boys

There’s no crying here but anyone can

Get a gun to be seen to be known

Because violence like sex like guns sell

And politicians can be bought and

The bottom line is not life but power but

Money money money money money.

God, in America no one feels safe

Violence normalized romanticized

Anyways, we need the protection

Anyways, laws don’t do nothing

Let them have their guns, let them

Shoot until there’s no one left to clean

The blood from our white collars.

God help America, land of the mass murder

Massacre land of the sick care health care

Land of fences and walls and camps

World’s strongest military rape culture

Oligarch rich-getting-richer president

Keeping us controlled, confused, divided or

…Dead.

Dopamine of distractions

How easy to misplace our essence among the tangle of life's demands,

the web of routine, the dopamine of distractions. Everyday is a practice in

returning to the dreams we know are true, hunting for beauty in the present, 

accepting discomfort as a roadmap for growth. The forgetting happens less 

as we commit to the remembering, and the gray shimmers like silver. 

Scoliosis

Some women in my family have idiopathic scoliosis

My sister, my mother's sister, myself, along with

Two or three percent of the population 

We have off-center centers

Topsy-turvy bones

Sometimes while I am lying

In bed trying to sleep

I feel the curvature, the

Wrongness of it

I can’t get comfortable 

Only puberty could cause such a

Confusion

A three-dimensional abnormality --

I want to know what happened on the other side

That scared the spine from its cradle

It must be an imperceptible imbalance

It must be an inherent flaw

A glitch in the program

That built our fine faces 

Our dark hair and strange skeletons

If I say we’re crazy

I mean it in the good way

I mean we’re crazy determined 

I mean we like to speak our truth 

And look you in both eyes

It turns out that even small differences

Make you more interesting

And if you don’t pretend 

Your idiosyncrasies are invisible 

You might grow stronger in the strange place. 

Calcified

I tend to forget all the things available to me now:

The curl inside comforts, gifts from god(dess)

Muses / elixirs / flavors / sensations

Beautiful faces, bare skin, zaftig cheeks

Innocence free to delight in clean air

Aesthetic delight and kinesthetic pleasure

The rhythm of rain and little feet

The wine the butter the bread the wine

The sun, the steadfastness of its shine

The earth, the faithfulness of its spin

Our hearts, how they vibrate together

Our eyes, how they see color

Our ears, how they hear voices. //

I am human being, human doing

The dervish of life, years purling by

Experiences stacked like layers of dirt

We reach forth, we dig deeper. We hit

The crusted layers . We stab at the impasse

We grow tired of learning the same lessons until

We discover we are not calcified in every direction. 

Screens

Around what do we circumnavigate?

Colors, seasons, passions, family

Or perhaps a cornucopia of

Screens

The flow of validation

Where we document the

Colors, seasons, passions, family

Assuring ourselves

They happened

They matter

And why should we feel shame

For wanting to remember

And wanting to be seen.

Arid

There’s an arid patch

where I disappear

Should I forget

To cultivate

Growth,

The green kind

That ruptures.

Life seeks itself

Better

In loose spaces

Airy with love.

As a spiral 

Tightly wound

Seeks to unwind

And expand.

In tightness

We keep things in 

Other things out.

It’s not safer,

Only smaller

Nothing is safe

Everything is safe.

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The Embrace of Moon

We must turn away from the closest star

To see a universe brimming with them

We breathe the night

To break from consciousness

To process verisimilitudes of existence

To enter non existing worlds

We hide in shadows cast by knowing

But we can never hide from what's in our heads

We run and lose and get lost, but

The embrace of moon, the reflection of sol

Even when we cannot see it

Leads us back

Here

Now.

Older, Yes

Each night when I go to sleep

I wake up a different person

Older, yes

Another unevident line in the

Corrugated line up of evidence

A new context of experiences

Different dreams

Than the night before

A fine balance faltered

Stability alchemized to risk

Hope cultivated, marinated

In the circumstance of moments

Folded to fit into my pocket

If I have room amongst

The other trinkets I cling to

Like unfloating life boats

Because stuff always sinks

And birds cannot fly

With backpacks

Clipped to their wings.

Vortex of Miles

The distance we travel  A vortex of miles
Scandalizing our senses  Stirring the nectars of inspiration
Breaking and mending  Bending and molding our panoramas
Into unfamiliar impulses  The creation of anomalous realities
With edges smudged away  Into gradients of whimsy.

Growing Up

To watch a child grow up is to nurture a tender pocket of beating flesh into a conscious willful being.

To watch a child grow is to know the softest spots in a person and notice how these areas harden in response to the world.

To watch a child grow is to see how quickly life blossoms and transforms. 

To watch a child grow is to touch sweetness and know it intimately, only to let it go. 

To watch a child grow is to witness the expansion of knowledge and the sponge that soaks it up and squeezes it out in a conglomerated form.

To watch a child grow is to hold space for beautiful messes and wrong turns, sacrifices both expected and unexpected.

To watch a child grow is to unfold the folded pieces of your heart and write new messages on the inside.

To watch a child grow is to hear the whisper of the future as it echoes off the present.

To watch a child grow is to see how life arranges and re-arranges itself around the fiery light of love.

#childhood #motherhood #momlife #dadlife #growingup #love #poem #poetry #sanfrancisco #sfbay #vscocam

One Life, Three Perspectives

Someone explain to me

Why my purse is a hot mess

And what it is that scares 

Me about myself

Someone help me reconcile

The life I predicted

With the life I want

With the life I love

It's one life, three perspectives--

Past

Future

Present

I get lost between the lines

But not tonight because

God is here

Explaining.

Social Media Whores

 We post for connection

We post for attention

We post for validation

We act like what we love

Doesn't matter

Until they

The ensemble

Say it matters

We share beauty

In return for a chance

At something

Trading precious limited

Unmeasurable moments

Like countable commodities

For dollar bill wealth

Because we crave

Something that has been

Inside

Underneath

All along. 

Searching

Searching We wake up Searching We reach for our devices Searching We scroll We click We process Picking and choosing Information A haphazard conglomeration of Cultivated lives Authenticity A bendable fading truth Real life It's somewhere out there Not in here.

Freight Train

Sometimes Depression Hits her like A freight train It's her own fault She lies on the Tracks Waiting for The force Surrendering To the pain Risking Everything for A chance at Heaven.