i will sit here...

Sit down and listen, to what I have to say.
I can say a lot of things and mean nothing, I can say nothing and mean everything.
Your words are burning my intestines.
My pupils are dilating.
The rosary has fallen.
There is irony in simplicity.
My migraine is pleasant.
the bible is burning.

Sit down and listen, to what I have to say.
I can do many things and be nothing, I can do nothing and be something.
Your eyes are incriminating me.
My hands are shaking.
The pen has broken.
there is doubt in society.
this pain is hastened.
the cross is rotting.

In all this I’ve failed to rhyme, to capture a single word with the passage of time.
I will sit here, and listen.
I will sit here and see the stars go by.
I will be here and wait to hear the churning of peace.

???

i have all these thoughts in my head, i feel like its going to explode. please answer me, please answer my prayers, the question is getting old, its been years now and you still don't answer me....

perhaps this is all coincidence, perhaps superstition, perhaps predestination.

Every-time i pass by the museum i see the old brick catholic church, and i always look at the steel placard on the side of the door that announces the services and confession times, for some reason they are always during the time I am either trying to convince people to buy a lava lite with their drink, or listening to a professor ramble on about the great knowledge they have accumulated into their brains no bigger than mine. I always have the urge to run inside and sit inside the small brown room, covered in old rose wood inscribed with arabesque flowers and crosses, with a small window, a screen and hear the voice of a priest ask me my sins. be drowned into the darkness of this cublicle, and feel the small rays of light being deflected through the stained glass windows...I don't know why i feel this way, i have for years known that man has no power to forgive but the sins committed against him. I don't seek absolution, i don't seek heavenly acceptance or assurance in an after life, all i want is to sit there and have the words unfold, tell my story, say the words that are zipped inside my mind like a compressed file locked up in a small black usb memory stick that fell off my pocket written in code.

Sometimes i honestly think that there is something awkward and innately wrong about me. Ever since i was twelve i have had recurring dreams, dreams that change a bit and dreams that come back identically like yesteryear. I have fears that are not normal, I see things beyond their usual sphere, and i don't know if this is normal. I have contemplated on killing myself but that has now past years ago. I have waken up in the middle of the night and felt my skin ripple, my back fall, as though i had fallen from the ceiling, like someone grabbed me by the collar of the shirt, spoke into my left ear a chant and then let go. I wake up. Not knowing what to make out of it all... i think i am going through a mental break down, funny thing i was telling someone this and they said perhaps it was a breakthrough, perhaps it is. I can't speak to the priests, i feel awkward starting a conversation with my father because no matter what i am wrong, i have lost my sense of religiosity and think to myself i can always go back, praise in public, kneel in front of them all, join the choir, point fingers and quote the good book, but who am i fooling that is not what he had in mind at all...I sometimes think it would be better to suddenly disappear, after all the dreams i keep having over and over show a story unlike the dream of the man i one day would like to be. i don't understand my own writing, i have lost any sense of passion in life and would like to ignite the flare that will create a chemical reaction, a psychotic c4, here we go.... i see the painting, my eyes are adjusting, i'll shut my mouth before describing it, let it focus and then i'll give it a name.

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..........