Some Times Poems Come as a Mismatched Set

There have been poems that keep slipping between my fingers, like pennies
I can never have enough
Save enough
For the right moment
I spend too much
On trivial shit
A moments pleasure
Like a $5 photo taken with an aging Llama
Or words cashed in
On lovers who never loved
Me
We
start again
With outstretched palms
And empty
Pockets.

*******
It's 9 pm
Time encrusted with
A perfect sunset
Your mountain is
Blushing
Warm pink
With lavender creases
I think even
The landscape misses
Your smile.

Jim & Michelle

We talked last night about the Champagne flutes
that we never could find
and the beer steins
serving as substitutes
that we found in a junk yard
An Oakland treasure
We called them ours
despite the names Jim and Michelle
etched into the side
an open secret
You called them dead
I called them divorced.

We stole a story
from Jim and Michele's trash
took it to our wedding
and had a toast
to humor
and forever
to live
and forget

These now empty glasses that weren't
what we wanted
have shifted in our landscape
bulky and heavy
with names that aren't ours-
metaphors
that will take our lives
to understand
We have built
    a story
      a house
        ourselves
on these two beer steins
that were not what we wanted-
That may or may not be in the attic.

On the sunrise
of our five years
with rings, tears, laughter
I can't help but see
the poem start to emerge
Singing to the bird who still has yet to land
and to the hermit sculpting stories in the dark
beauty is about perspective
and love is as large
as we both can imagine
some times it's not about what you want
but what you've got.

Jim & Michele
Forever.

The Anticipation of Loss

Whenever I come to visit there are many little moments that feel meaningful, but I never can seem to wrap my heart around them. They fall like sand between my outstretched fingers.

My grandmother asked me if I wanted coffee, but what she meant was--did I want coffee to take home? Apparently, there were several pounds left over that my father had sent from Puerto Rico and nobody would drink it. She took 8 lbs to the senior center and gave it away. I want to think of the coffee as the peace offering that my father would never offer. I want the moment that I drink this coffee to know that our souls, if not our hearts, are absolved. I want to think that I could live with only taking what he offered, even if it was not offered to me.
*****
We ate outside in the garden, even though there were only 13 of us. There are many things that my family does wrong but taking care of our elders is not among them. We are eating here instead of at one of the lake houses because this is where she is and she, even with her bitterness, is where our heart is.

My grandmother has aged severely in the last year, shrunk just a little more into herself and lost what ever was left of social inhibition. My sister has brought a boyfriend on this trip-- the boyfriend who will probably be her last. It's an important moment. The boyfriend gives my sister the last bite of my grandmothers famous rice and my grandmother looks at him and says "Don't let her get fat". We laughed. We laughed because it wasn't funny, we laughed because it's in our blood-- a natural response to an uncomfortable situation, we laughed because there was nothing left to do, this was not a battle anyone would choose to fight with Grandma. The boyfriend blinked repeatedly, and said ever so softly, "I used to be fat." No one heard him over the laughing.

*****

There is a sadness that hangs here and I have been trying to figure out exactly what it is hung on. I can't tell if only I can see it or if everyone see's it and laughs anyways. I like to look at all of the photos, not because I remember the moments or want to remember the people, I look because I have always looked, it's the searching that's familiar.

There are no photos in my house. My history lives here in neutral colors and white trim. This is the only place that smells like home though I have never lived here, this house and my memory reek of dial hand soap and sofrito.

I feel the loss coming like October rushing toward July, the change is riding the mid afternoon breeze.

She doesn't want to have surgery on her shoulders and tells me that her heart hurts and soon God will say, "Aida you have been a bad girl." This loss has been on it's way to arriving for the last 89 years. She is ready, I am not.

Noon

Trying to write at noon on a Tuesday, is like trying to drive my truck without gas. It just sits there in the bold sun, sweating. The words were all possibility two hours ago and now they have retreated like morning glories at sunset.

I want the words to come out before my family arrives, before the dogs come home, before the afternoon gets away from me, like water in a drain.

Seattle isn't suppose to be hot and still, we should be packed in by clouds and a west wind. We should be drinking drinking black coffee and brooding.

The windows are open and the curtains are doing a modified tango with the breeze and yet the words are not wandering in, the stories about my mother, a fourth of July gay bashing, group homes and California's fault lines, are not willing to sit with me today.

Writing at noon on a Tuesday calls for an iced tea and private conversation with Sherman Alexie out among the sunflowers. No notes, no pens, no keyboards. Just whispers stitched on to the underside of my heart out in the bold and rare sunshine.

Thoughts on Pride

As we zig zag though side streets, she turns and says "You know, I go to the Cuff to sort of make sense of it all". I suppose that's why we go to gay bars--whatever we are trying to make sense of. I think about the history of pride month, the various uprisings, lifetimes of an up hill battles, the gore mixed with glitter. It's three days before pride and you can feel it rising, the bigger smiles, bigger drinks, it's a little bit like the rise of rainbow feeling acid reflux. Our bodies are trying to digest our once a year gorge on the beauty of our experience, despite whatever it is we lost. We all have lost something/someone-- in battles there are always losses.

I grew up a little bit east of everywhere, where one small town bleeds to the next. Pride mattered, the internet was still stuttering and the winters were long. There was no corporate sponsorship. Just people, in park, on a summer day. I was 16, I didn't know about uprisings, I didn't know what love felt like but I knew that I belonged there some how, I didn't yet know what it would cost me to belong, or that I would end up on the outside anyways.


********

It isn't true you know.
That rainbows and glitter
some how make it better
it doesn't get better
it gets different
its like growing up
and looking
at that old bike with training wheels
and somehow
it looks smaller
and we forget
that we got bigger
I think a photographer
would say
It's about perspective
no one talks about the storms
that blow in the rainbows
or the glass that was shattered
to make the glitter
there's a story here
that we just can't seem to remember
but it's etched into our bones
buried in our veins
covered in cobwebs in our history
and we forget about the pain
because rainbows
are rare
and beautiful
but fading with
ever breath, step, march.

Bones

People talk about
the bones
like it matters
I always imagined
steel bolts and solid wood beams
a heart buried among
the sawdust and spiders
A soul crushed between
dry wall and latex paint
I thought character was about bones
and foundation
and there's a wall
laying haphazardly
in the back yard
chucked out a window
200 lbs of bones
melting away in the rain.
I asked about why we add
texture to walls
my guy tells me
to hide the imperfections-
industry standards.

It's the imperfections
that grab me,
the plaster that wasn't quite even
in my inexperience
and the nail hole that was missed
in the caulking
the slight chips of time,
it's the scars that make the character
not the bones

the bones are what the scars
cling to
in a summer storm.

Scars

You asked me to tell you about a scar. Instantly I thought about my chest, the bilateral scars that snake along the underside of my pecs. Then I moved lower running my thumb along the scars in my abdomen from my hysterectomy, following the path downward I settled on what I tend to imagine as the old man in my knee. The cadaver ligament I acquired last spring. But these scars get plenty of attention.

Two scars come to mind. One is not mine and the other not yet real.

The scar that is not mine belongs to my sister. The upper corner of her lip met a flaming marshmallow, just after sunset, the winter we were practically kidnapped. It was cold, we did most of the cooking on a grill outside the double wide trailer that rested among oak trees in central California. Some how she got bumped just as she went to blow the flame out on the marshmallow. I remember screaming before she even realized what had happened. My father grabbed a wet towel and put it over her mouth, trying to cover up her wailing more than ease the pain. Today she's 30, and the old triangular scar the size of a lucky charm is no longer visible, but bodies them selves hold memories, and they even sometimes hold memories that don't belong specifically to that body. I don't like roasting marshmallows, when I see them, I see her 8 year old face full of excitement catch fire. The image is burned in my memory like the California's landscape after a wildfire. Still smoldering, black and strikingly empty. I asked my sister about the scar, and she said, "What scar?"

The second scar is a currently a figment of my imagination. Sometimes in some cases this is how scars are born. I am still debating whether I want/need surgery on my ears again. This new scar will not be hidden like the others. It will rest on my temples as if my ears will forever be held at gun point. It could cause a whole host of problems, it could be the tombstone for my sense of taste or my ability to feel my face. It could also be a memorial to my time that was silent and now only sound will always exist. I will not be able to remove it and move through sound or silence at will. This theoretical scar will pin me down forever as one or the other. I have never been very good at one or the other.

Bacon

I have always been afraid of bacon. Really afraid of bacon.

It took me years to put it together.

Sometimes during the weekend, while I was little, my father would make breakfast. This is the only time I ever saw him cook before my mother died. He would get up early wearing only a white t-shirt and BVDs. A while back, my sister had her only Puerto Rican boyfriend who upon looking at a photo during this time period said, "He looks straight out of Watts". He did. Dark brown skin, thick muscles, the slow gait of heavy lifting and light pay. Some times he was gruff and as monosyllabic as a Spanish speaker can get. Sometimes he was kind, taking his time after breakfast to brush out my waist length hair from the bottom or letting me cling to him after yet another ear surgery facing uncontrollable vomiting.

During these weekend breakfasts I never knew which side of him we would get. I liked watching him cook. I liked watching the bacon shrivel as if by magic, the ritual of putting down a paper towel and laying each piece out dry. Without my hearing aids in and even then before I "needed" them, I cannot hear bacon sizzle. I get the concept, I can see the concept and after two very recent kitchen fires I am very aware how heat works in the kitchen. I wasn't aware then. Maybe I was five years old. I didn't hear him tell me to stand back. I remember distinctly what it felt like as the oil and fat hit my arm. It leapt out and grabbed me, burning a hole into my memory. My father told me it was my fault and to never go near cooking bacon again. And I didn't. For years and years, I was afraid and despite my love of bacon, I shunned it. It began to represent my fear of my father, the oil just grabbed me like one of his bad moods and I didn't even see it coming.

I suppose that people are resilient and my love of bacon has led me to being able to fry it up, keeping the parts of my fathers ritual that served me. The early morning wake up, cooking the entire package at once, black coffee and paper towel for the final lay out. I still stand back though, still have the fear of oil, fat, anger-- reaching out and grabbing, pulling me back to a snot nosed kid, with a several burn marks and new void in my world where the magic of frying bacon use to be.

Red Ribbon Hospice

We play Skip Bo
Like we are in a Casino,
It's fueled
black coffee quick
and the minutes tick
by
hours,
ticking by days
washing up years
and Lucy died yesterday
with her favorite red nail polish still wet
and it's Pride month
and I am sitting with forgotten ghosts
People talk about AIDS like it happened
and George tells me about falling in love
with a soldier
in the Vietnam war
They tell me about their lives
like they happened
like the story is at it's epilogue

Here, among the florescent lights
hangs
every Tuesday,
scattered coffee mugs,
left overs from lunch
and lives
that aren't
quite
history.

The Sound of Silence

It took losing my hearing to fall in love with Yo Yo Ma. It happened on a Wednesday in rush hour, riding in a the picturesque modern day cowboys truck actually named Truck Noriss, skirting downtown traffic, with a Texan who had beat thyroid cancer twice, who had years ago fallen in love with american sign language, and was taking me to a bar where we would huddle in the back with just enough light to almost make out our abc's. He wanted to introduce me to this album he had fallen in love with, I wasn't sure until he turned up the bass so loud the dash board shook and his coffee cup was practically leaping out of the holder. This is the only way to listen to Yo Yo Ma. I put my feet on his dashboard and fell, completely in love. I let the bass notes tumble up and down my spine, let silence rest on my sternum until bam -- my heart woke up. I now know that it wasn't exactly Yo Yo Ma that I fell for but the the curves of the cello. Some days I can hear the whisper of the notes but mostly I just feel them, it was the cello that taught me that there IS sound in silence, and that there will be another world, another way of being, new unexpected love randomly and mismatched just around the corner, the cello makes me less afraid of letting my hearing go, the cello has shown me that life is not what I have expected it to be, and deafness isn't either, two years ago with 60% of my hearing intact, I couldn't hear a thing.

*****
There is something about a sunny day, a Chevy pick up, and rock and roll. I was half way through listening to "Free Falling" when it hit me. I pulled over, along side lake Washington and a late spring breeze. I pushed up the volume as far as it would go. I tapped gently on the steering wheel, I let the bass vibrate all the way up my spine, I could feel the clash of the symbols on the left side of my ribs, just beneath my heart. And the words jumped off the windshield gently nibbling the back of my neck. My hearing aids were tucked safely into my front pocket, I wasn't hearing a thing. Not a goddamn thing. I have wondered what sound feels like in silence, it feels like the rush of Christmas morning as a child, the excitement of a first date, an earthquake, an orgasm, it feels that my body is a boat on an wild but tender river, it tastes sweet and metallic, it feels like success.

I have been mourning my loss more and more, trying to get my self to a place where I can treat my hearing as essentially a library book. It was good for the time I had it, I loved the story it told, a perspective of the word that I experienced but now it's time to give it back, of course it's a loss but there is a whole new world to experience, and this world is all new and totally mine. So here I am free falling into the sound of silence that is so loud and full of a million vibrations, it's deafening.

New Paint

Most people think I am white
shit,
sometimes
I think I am white
but I have been painting
and the paint is peeling
from my knuckles
my brown skin with white gashes
I am a stain from
some long ago, never spoken about, incident
in the tobacco fields of Puerto Rico
I pull the bright white latex paint
from my skin,
piece by piece
and only my worn brown skin
remains.

Learning my ABC's

A year ago, all I knew were my ABC's. My hands were awkward and shy. I was afraid.
Afraid to say the wrong thing, afraid of being inept, afraid of not fitting in. Afraid for my hearing loss. Afraid for my life.

And yes, while signing at a play party, instead of saying nice to meet you, I have signed nice to fuck you.

And while sitting on a city bench at a busy intersection, instead of saying to my friend, "a woman behind you just tripped and fell." I instead signed, "a woman behind you just tripped and died."

It all started with a new set of hearing aids and the news that my hearing is on it's way out. The news came to me the same way someone might say "garbage day is on Tuesday."

It started with learning, learning how to use a phone with assistive technology, how to set captions in color on Netflix, how to ask for what I need. It started with the ABC's and colors, with numbers and with "what's your name?"

And now, the fear is gone. Hunger replaced it. I want to know about classifiers, word order, verbs and facial expressions. I want to know more about ASL, Deaf culture and art, I want to know more about other people who have lost their hearing. I need vocabulary, I want to leave my aids in a drawer, I want to be me- stand on the line between hearing and deafness- drinking with the jims (beam and Morrison)--grieving what's been lost, celebrating what's been gained and loving music in silence.

It's shocking how much a year has changed my hands, my outlook and my ability to trust that I am not perfect but growing perfectly.

Sunflowers

I find myself on the edge of a storm, sowing seeds ever so carefully. I don't know why I find myself in the garden when it's about to pour. I stand on the very edge sweating in the last corner of sunlight, with the heavy gray sky whispering her secrets to the last few days of spring. I find my tattoo'd knuckles warm in the dirt, literally burying a metaphor with my sunflowers. It's prayer to summer, to tomorrow, to that rainbow I feel on the back of my neck.

It's taken me years to admit my love affair with flowers. Somehow I was afraid of not being enough--man enough, butch enough, to pass for normal.... enough.

I never was butch, I had the swagger but not the heart, this has always put me on the edge of tears, and I have never known why.

I think of the years I spent in the fields of Watsonville, I think of the men who would get up early in the morning and lay down the 14 foot pipes to water. I think of the lettuce and kale. I think of my favorite flowers--agrostemma-- the roses of heaven. I harvested, I boxed, I washed, I loaded the truck, I ran the market.... it was working on the farm that led me to being able to harvest sides of myself. It was at the farm that I could finally love flowers and still have my masculinity. It was working for a farm that gave me the support I needed to transition, no questions asked. Live and let live. As I tended to produce, I too, blossomed.

And today with the whisper of rain, and my sweat mingling with a rainbow, I sow my prayers to summer, to tomorrow, to sunflowers.

Monuments of weeds and gentrification

Not long before I moved to this block, the city started a pilot program. They redesigned the block to be a multi-use space, a place to walk, drive, bike and even play in the street. They put in random gardening plots, forcing cars to theoretically slow down. They put in trees, and plants and then they forgot about us.

Five years later, the plots now sit as thrown out overgrown poems with stanzas of weeds. Some times they serve as forts for the neighborhood dogs to win and lose in the still of a hot day. Sometimes they become mini landfills overnight. And then there are moments like these that they loom as monuments to gentrification, alive with whatever will exist throughout a war. I have heard that dandelions can live just about anywhere.

Last night as the rain was just becoming a storm, it seemed like a good idea as any to work on the plot in front of my house. It seems like my plot is a beacon for volunteer trees, and one began much too close to another one. All it took was a warm winter for this a little seed to become a 6 foot tall giant stealing space it was not meant for and had no fruit to offer as means of rent.

It's a sad thing to fell a tree and this is my second this spring. It took 6 of us-- two being onlookers-- to tie the tree to a truck bumper and yank it out. It gave way with a pop and it's roots stayed completely intact, as if it always knew that one day it would be forced out with no home to ever return to.

Rock Me Like a South Bound Train

I forgot that trains, like memories have pulses and heartbeats that do not always run in sync with mine.
I forgot that memories like trains have hidden conductors and engineers. I don't know how memory works, I don't know how trainswork. I just know that they work but there can be accidents and they can be devastating.

Yesterday, I found a handful of birds swooping around my back yard picking off the yellow jackets for a late afternoon snack. It took me back to Oakland and bee keeping right off telegraph avenue, shoved up between whole foods and gentrification. A group of us rented a house from an old Berkeley hippie who was heading south, the agreement was to at least care for the bees, if we could not come to love them. I remember standing on the back porch one warm afternoon watching Oakland pigeons do their ghetto version of murmuration and I noticed swallows swooping into the yard and snagging bees as they came and went from the hives. I remember calling the home owner panicked. She told me that it was okay, the birds needed a little protein and this is the way of the birds and the bees, she told me that the birds would not take more then they need.

I need to remember not to take more than I need.

I need so much lately. I think I have been a smoker to chase a need that can never be fulfilled. It's really not about the habit, or the nicotine, it's trying to fill a hole, or maybe it's several. I feel like a shooting victim, riddled with holes and the bullets are memories laying on the floor, still and dead and difficult to find among the carnage. I am trying to make my self whole again. It's not just cigarettes or trying to fill all of the holes by swallowing fire, it's a need to consume. Some times it's cigarettes, sometimes it's coffee or french fries and sometimes it's booze. I feel so empty, with my memories littering the floor.

This feeling of being in pieces, clings to me, it's become a residue that can never be washed off. It makes me think of my father and how he came home from Vietnam with the residue of war. A residue that we call Schizophrenia. He will never be free of his residue, and what I want to know, what I need to know--- will I ever be free from mine? Can I be whole again?

I read somewhere once that "nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered." I constantly change my mind about whether I am chasing my memories or running from them. I want so badly to remember more about my mother, I want to understand why I cling to her. A few weeks ago I was moving her old sewing table into my studio space. I was gearing up to make the transformation from a useless piece of furniture to a wedging table and I opened one of the drawers. I found a needle and thread, a tin of laxatives and a receipt from Lucky's grocery store dated 1987. The items on the receipt are as follows; 2 packs of Marlboro reds, a box of Oreo's and a diet coke. These three items are the only things I have ever known my mother to love.

Some times I can remember a lot. The color of fluid in my mother's IV bag, my fathers eyes, addresses, the flowers of the magnolia tree that hung so lazily next to my Grandmothers old house. Some times I can't remember my phone number, birthday or social security number. I never can quite seem to remember who I am. But I always remember the calm that my sisters voice had on me when she would sing. Whenever we were scared she would sing. Sometimes it would be songs my parents loved. Something by Tracy Chapman, or Frank Sinatra. Sometimes it would be from Disney movies or what ever was on the radio. My sister and I both learned early that art--art is something one clings to, because everyone needs to cling to something-- and god had stopped listening.

There is this feeling in my memories, this sense of a search. A shared fabric though them all. I am looking for home, looking in every moment, breath,trip to the corner market. It's not exactly myself that I am looking for, it's a place in my heart to call home. And it's been right here all along-- not the random hotel outside of Portland, or in the rains, or in a tiny house in Rainier Beach. It's in words, it's in writing. This is home, this is where the train fueled by my memories has brought me.

Home. To writing. To me.

I am the conductor, the engineer and mechanic of my own memories and every story is a beat in the heart of my life.

Resistance

Usually when I make art, it’s quick, messy and thick with a sense of urgency. With ceramic sculpture I will take my time to make sure that it won't fall apart or blow up in the firing process but I won’t smooth out fingerprints or nail marks or that little dent just to the left. It’s often imperfection that makes something beautiful or at least lends some sense of meaning. When I paint or draw or write all of this still applies, it may all be patched together quickly or hazardly but it will be standing come morning. This is my resistance.

I rarely go out to buy art supplies, I have never been very good at allowing myself this indulgence. So, I find them. Discarded wood on the side of the road, already painted on canvas at the thrift store, old stove tops in a junk yard, free house paint on craigslist. The greatest gifts I have ever received in life have been art supplies. Trying to create something from what the world has given me has turned into an art practice in itself.

My Mother was an artist but I didn't understand this before she died. As a kid, the fact that she sewed was boring. Sure, I loved the blankets that she made just for me and was even some what intrigued by the dolls but I didn't understand the skill that went into it. I didn't know about fabric choices and colors and stitching it all together. I did not appreciate quilts or afghans or the beautiful dresses. But I married a seamstress and once again find myself more often than not in fabric store on rainy Saturdays. And it’s the patterns that I notice. I loved them as a kid, I loved fingering through packets upon packets of something I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand. Maybe It’s the unbearably thin paper with the notches and dotted lines that magically make clothing, or blankets or something useful. Everything is exact, complete with instructions on how exactly to cut this unbearably thin paper, it makes me think of surgery and skin and blue prints. There is an art to stitching it all together, to making it work, to linking one piece to the next-- this too has become part of my resistance.

Most days I have no idea who I am or how I got here or if I have even arrived. But I know that I have stitched something together despite the fact that I can’t even thread a needle. I know that I have become a sculpture of found moments, grief and distant memories to painful to be anything but abstract. It’s all here, stitched together quickly at midnight or maybe it was 4pm every thursday for the last twenty years. Some of it’s glue, some of it’s clay and some of it’s tears. It’s messy and childish and strong enough to weather a storm. I don’t know if it comes apart, I don’t know if I want to take it apart, I don’t know if I can look at it piece by piece, moment by moment, because it’s all just thrown together with everything I have, it’s private and ugly and the most beautiful thing I have ever sculpted from nothing.





Some days I want to show it to you, even in pieces. And everything feels wrong and I know that this is the answer, to peal back the moments like an onion, to reveal why the sculpture still stands come morning, to revel in the masterpiece of becoming and creation.





And I resist in sharing and telling and the truth because silence and resistance have become the glue, the substance that is holding me together. Resistance is everything, it’s all I have left. And I am going to cling to it because that is survival. Resistance is living, it’s what brought me to this moment and what will hold me until the next. I can not stop resisting, this is the pattern, the stitching, and all of the lint in my metaphorical pockets-- I let go of this and everything --sculpture and all come tumbling down. Resistance has become the fiber of my being and sculpting my secrets into meaning has become my art.