asteroids to my senses

Asteroid for my senses.
These thoughts seem to flutter through my senses quite like asteroids, revolving and rotating always coming back so often, not noticeable at once. Its been several months since I felt this. This hope for a resolution, a dramatic ending.
I have found God in the blue seat of a torn transit train seating across me with a bright smile hidden behind black tarred broken teeth, a smell of reeking piss and layers of oil, dirt, and grease. I see his smile, he has no home, he has but a nickel and three pennies, a euro a tourist dropped and a small wrinkled and slightly ripped picture of his mother. He sits alone; the car is packed with people resembling sardines in suits and pencil skirts, blackberry’s and Iphones, New Yorkers and Wall Street journals. But the seat to his right is empty; I lift my hand to cover the stench. His arse is angled on the edge as though he was inclined towards getting full coverage of the climatic scene in a film, or waiting for the gunfire to start a three hundred yard dash. He speaks. I put the white plugs on my ears, press the home button, I scroll down to a song and hear the drums boiling sense to my asteroids, throwing my conscious unto a flyaway object. I close my eyes and try to forget the face that looks back at me, the smells that creep up on me. I open my eyes only to find an empty seat in front of full of blood. I look out as the doors close, an there he goes, he begins to tremble and suddenly falls, he seems to be in shock the world stands still but says not a thing, the small picture is floating in the blood. I can’t help but wonder, and ignoring my phobia for blood dip my index finger and thumb to grab the small wallet image. Only to find an image of myself, and all I could do was but ignore him as he stuttered to tell me something. I guess things are here, they have always been, I have just never known the shape of things. If you paint a painting with garbage and multiple TV screens and show it to an indigenous person and ask him to describe the object that they see there, they will see nothing. You see what you know, and what you know is little to something, anything, in reality nothing. please, Open my eyes!

keep the change

keep the change.

I draw my index finger up, pulling away the thin black frame up, as it slides back up, above the small bump on my nose. the bump that has a story of its own, a perfect hail mary i was visually to discombobulated to catch, a collision and a blood bath, a few minutes of unconsciousness and hence the bump. i have a small bruce on my nose, perhaps its because of the slight skewness of my frame, the improper placement of the broken temples with crazy glue has deformed them. I am running late, my back's aching quite bad and i couldn't quite get anything done this sunday morning. The powerpoint is still in the ideation process, and its 2:45 the day before deadline. I have fifteen minutes till i stand in-front of the aloha screen, swipe my card and begin another shift, the only problem is I am two miles away. i quickly run to the ATM across the street and withdraw what will be enough for a falafel wrap and a cab drive. I had a conversation with my father the day before about buying a house. We talked about getting a place of their own and all. I would have to stay with them for several years to pay the new pad, so it was on my mind that day when i got on that white intercepter. It was the first cab on the corner of sacramento and main. it was not bright yellow, it was not new or old. it was in good condition, the color itself had a monotonous effect on your eyes. the man seating in the driver's sit was in his fifties, wore a checkered golf hat, it was one color, grey but with different shades of saturation. he was either middle eastern or latin American, i couldn't quite tell and he had no accent. I sat in the right back side, worried that i would arrive late, thinking about getting done with this semester and "the house". I started small talk with the cabbie. the usual phrases: how are you? how's business? the recession rants and shit of the sort. We ended up talking about opportunism in times of economic despair . He changed his voice, it became very slow as though every word, every vowel, every enunciation that bled from his lips was heaven sent. as though they were recited words from Gabriel, zarahustra, or meher baba. He told me this: "yesterday, someone bought a new house and looked down on you because you had none, today they lost their job and lost their house. you, you are still working, doing the same thing you were doing when they bought their house. now they look at you from below. they look at you and say 'that guy has been doing the something for years, has no house, has no car, but he is happy' and then they will realize that happiness doesn't come from having a house or money"... My brain quickly scavenged for some sort of response. you can still hear the echo of my stupid overzealous words: "happiness comes from a state of mind not from possessions". I know this, I've known this. I dropped my falafel wrap, the spider webs seemed to have fallen from my eyes, the thoughts blended like ice cubes in the old glass thrift store bought blender i use every morning. My stomach begun to turn, i could feel the protein-whey-fiber-banana-shake and coffee mix within my intestines, the after taste of the omega three capsules radiating from my esophagus. He seemed to have heard my stomach rustling within, and then said to me: "everyday you have to put an alarm on your watch, five times a day, and stop. stop what you are doing and bring yourself back to that thought 'that happiness is not depended on the outside, on having a house or money', you need to bring yourself back or you will drift away, if you do this everyday two years from now no one one will recognize you. you will be a different person. just as he was saying that a quote from a movie projected unto the small darkroom wall in my brain. I thought about islam, and how you are required to pray five times a day, a sort of beeping watch that reminds you to kneel, to humble yourself to something greater. It all sort of clicked, like the ink cartridges as they "pop" into place, and now your printer works. you an print those endless pages of knowledge. I begun to understand why an author would title a book "Jihad and McWorld", I realized that McWorld, the american dream, corporate america and its values were in direct conflict with happiness, with meaning, with jihad (our inner struggle for perfection) and we needed to take ourselves back, kneel or at least think as the watch beeps five times a day. I see how the other side sees the world. how my peripheral vision is bad, i can go back three days to when the doctor said please look into the goggles, we want to see if your peripheral vision is alright. is there a test for our souls vision? a blinking dot and a right hand control where i can click and at the end find out what is wrong?

I pulled out my folded bills, and handed them to the cab driver and said thank you. I said thank you not for the drive but for his words, the extra five said thanked him for the drive but my lips screeched a sound of gratitude, that a gymnasts says to a therapists, the sort of expression a sinner has towards a priests, I saw the world and it saw me. i am looking at my watch, thinking to myself "happiness is not made of tangible objects" & wondering if i will be able to bring myself back to this point tomorrow as i am clocking in to work, as i cash out my check and do the math in my brain, and play with the idea of a house.

ill

it was a warm Saturday afternoon. the ice cream truck passed through the neighborhood, mi primo and I were playing soccer on the street. we ran home to scatter for some change. All i could find was less than a buck, so i wouldn't taste a cold Popsicle that day, but i bought a small bottle of lucas chili sweet candy. We ran back to his backyard which was like everyone Else's in the area, we lived in he projects, they were all the same, Easter hill they called it was to be a haven in the fifties but turned out to be a third world community in the nineties. An in the afternoon before the sun ran off after the stars and the moon treated on our skies we were allowed to play and not see the cars speeding bye, the dime bags being passed off, the shots flaring in the nightlife. It was fourth of july everyday. if you know anything about the city of Richmond, you would know that it was strategically formed into a triangle of violence with a set of projects at each point, i.e. corner. We jumped the small black fence and sat in his backyard, he went inside and brought out two coco-cola cans, we opened them and begun to indulge our palates in the cold caramel substance, a vile poison to our frail bodies. He asked me for some of the lucas powder, we would pour it into our left hand's palm and with our index finger dip it into our tongues, the sodium filled powder would tingle in our small tongues. it burned a little but then again we were Mexican, and like the stereotype goes we ate peppers and acids 24/7. Gerardo, had the ingeniously crazy idea of sniffing the powder, i rejected. I told him that it would be better if we poured it into our soda cans and drank a new drink "lucas-cola", it was going down the same tube anyways, no problem in mixing the two, later they would turn and burn in our intestines. I poured it into my can, took a sip and spat it out, We then went back to idea numero uno. I sniffed the powder. it burned as though someone had flushed car battery acid down my nasal passage, as though someone had stuck a pen or straw in my nostrils and lid them on fire... twelve years later i feel the same burning in my nose, but this time its not my childish play but a dreaded fluesh-allergy.
At a young age i learned that certain things don't mix, Lucas and coke don't mix, liquor and my mom, my atomic family and my extended family, English and Spanish, play and work, milk and watermelon, cake and orange juice, coffee and oatmeal, good and bad, tarot cards and the bible, public life and ripped jeans, Curly long hair and me. Sabado sensacional and church, rompope (eggnog) and summer, me and sickness.
my father once told me "i don't have the luxury of being sick", i thought he was trying to be poetic. But i soon found out that he didn't mean poetry at all, far from that my father isn't the type that sits down and reads gabriel garcia marquez or classical Castilian. If he became ill, we would not survive, i don't mean to demean my mother, they both have worked their arse off since i can remember.He meant that he could not afford to get sick and since then i have carried that inscribed in the back of my brain parallel to any memory of sickness. He has been hurting in his back lately, i hope he becomes well, my mother has been a sort of punching bag for this dreadful parody of life. I can recite the explicit words i have screamed at God in anger at the several time she has sat in the seat by heaven. in isle labeled ER. The countless surgeries, the countless curses i've raised to heaven in the dark alleys of my mind. I have become stoic towards illness, numb to the fact that it hurts, I have grown worry of a perfect health.
I have had this dream since i can remember, a countless story that repeats in my sleep, I've never told anyone this, but it recurs over and over. I see myself running in the thick of night, through a field of cars, a vast lot filled with red, white and blue ones. I am dressed in slacks, rolled up sleeves, a red bright tie, my hair is long, i run to an entrance, a bridge that connects the lot with the side entrance, I see my brother standing looking at me, in a cold stare, I see a nurse and an EMT run in, I am in tears, my feet thread pass through the tiled marble. All i hear is "She is dead", I see my mother looking from the entrance in awe, awaiting my entrance and it ends. I have no clue what this dream means, or who is "She"... It was 2001 around Christmass time when my mother was in intensive care, i remember saying "God, kill me first". And ever-since i see sickness as a passing cycle, a minuscule thing, as a small pebble in my path, nothing more. I don't have the luxury of being sick, of accepting it as a part of me. I don't need curanderos, just a four shot mocha, two Excedrins and a fifteen second plea to the sky..........

Two weeks of boredom.

So they closed down my job for two weeks for renovations... and the only thing I could think of was the fact that i could finally grow my beard, its been about 400 days since i have gone five days straight without shaving, and i can honestly say I feel weird, so i decided to change my look to look like the lead singer of demon hunter, bald head with a long beard... so yesterday i came up with this painting, it had been some time since i painted anything, I am going to make a similar one tomorrow, i'll be doing a bit of a blue bleeding down, and red bleeding up on top of na old unfinished portrait of a woman i painted, i'll later paint multiple lines and triangles on top to give it a three-layered image effect, hopefully it comes out good. thats pretty much it for me this week, o yeah i watched anamorph, its a wonderful tale of crime and justice all wrapped up in an dark aesthetic fashion. ciao....

God’s Aquarium

I imagine God, as a little boy who has a new blue plastic aquarium in his bedroom, sitting by the window. Its clear in the bottom with a bright electric blue lid, with holes for air in which to go through. there's small pebbles, river stones. they are red, brown, all shades of brown. and in his little aquarium there's a little tortoise. A small green tortoise, its shaded like a mint leave, like the inside of a plump ripen avocado, with a golden pattern all over its shell. Its frail, its small, I imagine Him, taking the blue lid off, and with his soft perfect hands, lifting the petit creature out of its cage. his little fingers rubbing the ruff green scale-like bumps on the poor creature's back. the tortoise hides his head, his small tail and limbs all cave in, and the small boy begins to cry he changes the water, he makes sure its not too much or too little, he puts his mother's thermometer in and verifies that the water's warm enough for his reptilian friend, and he gently puts him back in. He puts small green pellets in the plastic world, and covers it with its blue ceiling. and as the boy leaves, the tortoise pulls his head out and begins to swim, eat, live. I guess sometimes I am too scared to feel his warmth, to see his gentle hands caring for me, I guess...

Confessions. 0001

Confessions. 0001 There's no seat, well there is but its wooden and poorly designed, its not meant to comfort nor to soften a brutalized corpse. I Can't quite remember when I got that Chair, I don't know when But one thing is certain, its unique. So one day, about two years ago, i was attempting photo emulsion, or to put it in lay terms screen printing. I designed a cesar chavez stencil that was supposed to be photographed into a screen and placed on t-shirts. T-shirts that I would sell at a cesar chavez festival, and make big bucks. See I had the whole thing planned out. It was made in a way that my profits would double my initial buy in; The kind of insurance a pro card player has when he walks into a garage filled with middle aged, beer bellied, blue collared, bald blind men who play once every blue moon. It was impregnable. I would buy one hundred t-shirts at the cost of three dollars each. The screen would cost $45, The chemicals $15, with the paint and everything else it would cost me $500. I would sell every t-shirt for $15, and at the end of the day i would have $1500, One Grand in profit. The story was never like that, I couldn't get the liquids and lighting to work properly. Its been two years, I only made a batch of 5 t-shirts, the design was not detailed, it was just free-drawn with a blue water pigment that bled a lot. Till the day I still say I will make my entrepreneurial career with t-shirts, The cesar chavez is barely noticeable on the chair nowadays (On the chair were I used the stencil to paint; if Aa t-shirt was not its place perhaps the wooden brown chair I sat in every night when I opened the textbooks) the paint is faded, but regardless its still a colourfull thing, with holes punctured through the wood, its aesthetically haunting. So I confess, I've failed, I've given up, I've let a little ignorance stop me from doing what I promised myself one day. I confess.

it was Insane to not Turn Away

I sat there my eyes closing, and then opening, my head falling over, the people sitting scattered through the train. My hands holding on the chilled cold frame, the guy right across from me keeps looking at me with a sort of smirk as to show that he finds my frail body a joke, as I sway in and out of REM while moving on the underground. I feel that visage, someone looking, her eyes are like a crystal ball, like the rain frozen in a movie, some wicked CGI, Its a faded onyx black with a hint of green. She turns over, I lift my head and turn as though looking at the map on the plastic banner, as thought it was my first time on this wretched ride that steals ninety minutes of my day, every day. I lean back, she turns away. Her face is pale white, a hint of red, like that painting in my room I once forged after several hours stuck looking at my easel my last semester, correction i refused to use the easel it was a drawing board leaned back on a stool. Her hair is fine, its black and golden brown on the edges, There's a thin layer of silver outline in her egyptian eyes, Her hair is pulled back and tide in a knot, it falls to the sides, by her ears forming a cascade, She moves from her sit, she turns sideward, leaning her eyes at the dark glass reflecting and the doors on the opposite side. She gets up looks down as she passes, and walks through the doors, they shut and she's gone. Her lean hipster victorian self is gone, A blue navy skirt on top of black jeans, faded keds, a brown burberry jacket, a crossed brown wool scarf, and one of those "Little Brown Bag"s from bloomingdales. what an Idiot, I looked away, at the map again, o yeah I am lost. when its El cerrito plaza, and just across runs San Pablo Ave. I guess thats it, I am still the same shy lad From before. I could have at-least said hi, Deja vu its all a dream; But I guess that its like a miner who lets the diamonds pass through his fingers in the lake, he sees them and sways his hand, for some weird reason he doesn't lift it up, he just sands there as the light flickers bye to the point its all dirt and mud, i guess its the fact that where he's from he's not aloud a diamond, its the blood he pours while digging for the rich man that keeps him alive, and dreams are but a fairy tale told in his head forced to never leave the round walls of his inner membranes for fear of being labeled insane.