creative
creative
selected spoken word & written poems
creative works
selected spoken word and written poems
i. spoken word
ii. written
ii. written
i.
everyone has a dollar to spare
on w 47th st.
museums make us subject to object of
attention, simulation, appreciation
on sidewalks, somehow, however, but, because,
simulation subverts attention and contemplation
and ‘what will one dollar do’ and
(be)side(s),
it’s 100 degrees & $8 for liquid brewed beans
& inflation, the state of our nation
ste(e)p
us with a certain kind of sensibility, the one silicon valley calls “effective” altruism
a measured, even calculus
the governing structure of our decision between
one dollar or one dime.
and so it goes: amotherachildahumanapersoninapaperrhinhome
&ragsofhopeaglassjarofpennies
appeal, plead, for attention.
when the new york times headlined the heat wave
i crumpled
because it’s not the heat that’s crushing
but our paper thin hearts worn thin
in the new york brimming with a shimmering belief of better when, later, for
persons, not all.
everyone has a dollar to (de)spa(i)r
it reminds me of la, sf, &
every city we walk in this timeless
blindness.
in this city
i’m reminded of home.
ii.
stochastic chaos saturates
[& may we never find false sanctuary in]
the politics of clusters
cloistered in havens, clamoring the orbit of concrete jungle
jostling with the clairvoyant dreams of painters,
poets, and a tangy, lyrical raw so regal you cannot help but stop.
watch the ticking, theatrical displays of unprecedented ____
and still, a hollowness elongates the bend of stone cold arch(i’ve),
been witness to the pillaged, poignant residue beneath every unbroken
brooklyn promise;
finds itself ensnared, even, in spherical domes,
the slanted tower of two until,
it was latent until it was visceral:
as i walked past the gold emblazoned,
man-made-man merciless, obtrusive grasping for
immortality.
i recoiled at those we’ve endowed, entrusted with the solemn governance of a so-called sovereign,
three hundred million + nation
= equals ?
but this too, bears weight:
the very brick by brick by which we become -
as we learn to impress upon the impermanence and walk on
(un)even ground, despite.
i still believe the city speaks to
the keepers & dreamers of what has yet to be,
because we live in the ever-present always, a forgiving resolution which has always claimed residence, tenor to the
here, now, right now.
it may very well be all that’s left,
beyond the binary of zeros and ones of steel beam,
concrete arch, relic of restitution -
the kind which robs us before we can breathe.
it’s made of hurt harbored beneath the bridges claiming arms to the great divide;
it’s made of those who walked this land far before we’ve cemented its soil for ‘us’;
it’s made of every human person who reminds us what it means to be another human, all too human(e);
still, i believe the promise persists:
another love awaits (the)
u.s.
iii
standing straight-center, looking backwards,
it’s impossible to escape the stinging
transience
and how it it diSfiGUres, transfigures through the
unbounded bluntness of strobing lights
condemned to the encumbering ‘utility’ of time
on train tracks, as tradeoffs
teem restlessly with the unalone unalive.
but before i can hold the weight of this time war/p - - train A whisks by
it’s packed like sardines and somehow at six am still sweltering in
summer’s self-abnegating heat
and i’m just waiting.
for the sixteenth stop to the bronx,
passing time as the sleepless slumbering of those swallowed in a
palpable vortex of exhaustion,
replete with the tiredness of
nine to fives to midnights to oblivion
i find myself surprised by the indiscriminate holdings as
a single subway escapes what the strata of the streets cannot:
the same subway holding shoes polished ten thousand times, at the same time
holds hands worn by said polishing said ten thousand times and i can’t help but wonder
how they all slumber in the same way -
all walk what’s liminal between life and living.
and when i find myself at the sixteenth stop in the bronx
in a school of students fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen
and somehow already tired of the transit of living
i understand more clearly
milan kundera’s ‘unbearable lightness
of being’
iv.
asking an audience to arbitrate
personhood
is like trying to placate prismatic indifference
with the impression of truth
as the labyrinth sings its lullaby:
the 21st century whiplash in wanting,
malaise of mind, never-mind
bother with the obscured stickiness of just being.
whoever thought that was a choice —
— just being
must’ve mistaken it for [be](n)[i](g)[n] [g]
(no, never near metastatic)
and then there’s the allure of (re)arranging
again and again and
as the camera follows with the undying
promise of an euphemism’s charisma, its
shiny veneer practically plastered on the [ ] walls of
MoMA, Guggenheim, the Met, the likes —
what’s consigned to composition, mastery, artistry
is a brilliantly rhythmic kind of deception.
for it’s in these halls where i find
ten thousand million forever
reasons to unfold
fold, fold again.
v.
there’s nothing sunny about nyc,
especially when it rains
and nothing seems to slow down,
somehow everything becomes a cryptic harbinger for more hurried, more hustled, more —
and next thing i know,
i’m shoved in the subway, but it’s not malicious
it’s just hurried and
i’m still trying to understand the kind, not nice thing
the keep your head down, don’t talk to other people kind of thing
the snide welcoming that transplants are accustomed to
aren’t we all transplants, though?
i wonder as i walk the streets, not my own.
i feel entirely incongruent with this uptown downtown blue green orange red yellow line
well-at-least-you-haven’t-been-shoved-into-the train-tracks train of thought.
the streams and streams of water (the fresh kind we don’t have) scream abundanceabundanceabundance!
so suddenly it’s flooding
and it’s beautiful.
pools and pools of perishable puddles refract shattered light and the
puddles and puddles of orange yellow pink glean incandescently from the sky in
an arcane kind of beautiful
the kind that happens only once,
as you are, who you are.
and for maybe just a moment,
the smog, the clouds, the hurried clears from the limelight.
and what’s left is
nothing sunny, but
everything something,
everything still.
vi.
from:
the luxury of the color blue
wades the perennial playfulness
of a body (of water) —
swimming with memory, sincere, and
what it was like to be a toddler,
peering at the edge, stumbling in the trying desperation of darting after auburn lights, fireflies; teetering the edge of tree trunks and london planes; discerning the soft language of songbirds.
to be, and not beckoned to be(come)
in the obsessive quality where ‘becoming’ captures the twenties in our attention to no end,
escapes me in the midst of the reservoir tucked into the center of central park —
holding water, like memory
in a transgressive absence of abject cruelty
therein remains an unencumbered beauty reserved for no one but the birds who
listen closely as the melody
unfolds itself into the infinite abyss of
ephemeral hope just waiting.
the songbirds sing the language of
meaning unalloyed and beauty (unannounced).
all the while the luxury of the color blue
becomes mirror to sky to
a diety we can all pray
to:
vii.
the pressure of time presses on
and i’ve lost your attention
[ i ] face this as those
in perfectly ironed suits—to downtown, usually FiDi
in completely worn uniforms—to uptown, usually Harlem
wear work like a pulse, like an elliptical haunting - - - - tolaborlistlesslytoputfoodonthetabletomakefivesixseveneight…figurestomakesomeonejustsomeoneproudtostartafamilytobe[ know ](n)inthecosmopolitaintoivelostyourattentiontoaffordhealthcareandchildcareandeverydignifiedbasichumanrighttosupporttheparentswhoaregrowingoldtobecomesomeonetogetsomewhere -
i glance up from my notes app—the holder of every poem, every promise, every letter sent and unsent—
i realize [ i’ve ] missed the red line
i tell myself, i’ve told myself, i [ lost ] the red string, too
- - as if there’s just one tethering of just two - - souls
because i learned to believe there’s another line just three - - - blocks and two - - lefts,
one - right turn down
maybe not all the way back to brooklyn,
but maybe another turn at slowness, its vastness—
what the arbitrary unknown unfolds,
finding [ your ] love in lackluster and the loosening of strings, the telling of a second light:
i once thought the hurried was fraudulent, just hollow
i now realize it’s just human.
because the destination of this hurried is forever always: child, sister, brother, mother, father, family, beloved, soulmate.
a hurried to find a way to finance love,
to return to it with a fullness of arms, even if it means an [ ]
in soul, in and for the
[ attention ] economy of its governance
as i know now, everyone is always going —
— to where the love lives.
and still,
[ i ]
[ know ]
[ i’ve ]
[ lost ]
[ your ]
[ attention ]
viii.
‘air quality index is 178 which is worse than yesterday at about this time’
the weather app tells me what the pyrocumulus clouds already have —
canada, the midwest, the northeast know it too, what the rest of the world slumbers through —
the boreal forests of canada have caught fire.
a friend was shocked at my affliction:
aren’t you from la? and i wanted to say that it doesn’t make this hurt any less
but instead i said
we haven’t see the sun in the past 36 hours, just murkiness, just the harrowing grey,
just the forecasted unfolding of what climate scientists predicted thirty years ago, warned us like they did, like they do, like they always do.
but then again, i’m reminded of what we notice:
what’s in the sky for us.
or what’s made its presence known in headlines in whatever truth we subscribe to,
while the rest sinks into mere
fabrication&fakenews&hallucination,
the consequence of our atrophying
a t ten t i on spans becomes somehow less and more all at once as we come to
know only reality at its convenience,
most visceral and rightinfrontofus soluble form
and so as i stare at the scale,
the EPA air quality index falling between 1 and 500, i still worry —
as the trees fall, as the flames pillage acres & acres of land & forest & evergreen ecosystems, life just living in the earthly cycle we’ve exploited
and no one hears a sound —
i wonder if there’s a scale for the human quality
and its fa(i)ll(ings) &
flickers & sparks
a flame & once again
the trees fall again
& no one heard a sound
ix.
severance and 7 - - - - - - - degrees of separation;
some of us were just sixteen when we became 6 - - - - - feet a/part and
subsumed in the digital distortion of inexhaustible forms of contortion, but as
thoreau writes in walden,
no distance di vorcing 2 people
can make 2peoplecloser.
even and perhaps only in the evergreen, there remains a kinship in the very rootedness which civilization cordons off, immortalizes in
concrete and limestone —
his clairvoyance captures the contemporary,
glp-5s and peptides promise to make a person feel more—connected—in the promise of less
as if weight can only be scaled in flesh,
scaled in bone.
taught to sink or swim, we’ve been
thrown into the abyss of
nautical expression, self-“obsession”
the mirror of a million gazes, a fanatical display(ed)
i wish second class citizens haven’t had to, but they have (known) [(been known as) ((other)]wise) :
like The Woman Destroyed
like The Second Sex
(w)om(e)n find themselves endowed with an exceptional signature of obliging to obsessive obedience,
abdicating to self-divorce in a
parenthetically enshrined, obstinate othering
(from) (reality) (from) (each) (other)
the tethering we were promised in the womb,
is shattered upon birthright despite the 19th amendment, a convincing affidavit amidst a 21st century “gender parity”
is still a party preference —
corrosive, cadenced by originalism & the letter of law, let alone
living constitutionalism and the spirit of it,
the heart of it.