Falls Apart like Things

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can’t name that song
can’t say who it’s by
it isn’t my own.

The sound that isn’t mine
built itself in the walls of my jaw
built on fingered garlic stains
sweaty brown, stewed chicken hands
preparing somebody else’s dinner

haunting me as night falls
telling me, You should sleep
tomorrow when it’s today again
you’ll wake up better than me.
Hopefully…
You’ll calm yourself
and and and and and
fly further than me
as you follow the smell
the seasoning of a song
as everything inwards
while you’re looking the other way
presenting yourself
falls apart like things
not just yet anyway.

Θ

I woke up trying on a selfish hand me down
an inappropriate pass
an indifferent kind of sameness

instead of instant black coffee
I tried bit by bit
eating a tear
soon be decayed
teeth makes
from a toasted cream cheese bagel.

Is it nerves, my mother’s bad nerves?

The yellow transit of racing taxis
wisp by my self actualized step
down the side walk into speeding traffic.

Walking into this is it?

Θ

I took too many as directed
trapped on a trampoline
I fooled myself I could get off.
I’m faded fast Scarlet
crazed, faded fast Scarlet
bazodied deliberate
uncertain on how to walk
a mouse in a crowd of over sized designer shoes

there’s never enough square feet
between a strange hand and your ass
Scarlet.

Θ

Dismembered by space
room-less as I become
incompletely dressed
on the subway
in a business suit.

I’ll get use to shame
and hide in a secret:
mischievous looking doll faces
hoping for new eyes.

Elegy for Ma

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There is always the question of destination:
when and where will I go?
A sudden sadness erupts as we become witnesses.
When the flowers–once so voluptuous–turned prints,
dust, patches of petals–we try to reconstruct
only to discover what is lost is gone forever.

There is always the question of destination:
when and where will I go?
But never do we ask how is a flower a flower?
Was it her love petals that gave her beauty?
Her blooms to be gifts?
Did her soft aroma dare us to feel the fabric of her skin?

Mother

 “Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories. Only recently did I fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories- like her life- must be recorded.”   Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.

After reading this essay, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, I thought of my own mother obviously, and her stories she told me and my siblings. I remember how much it irritated me, since it was the same stories I’ve heard from the womb. But now, as I reflect on the stories that I’ve written, I’m reminded of those times she’d sit with us, and tell us about her life, like we were her recorder, documenting those times that were missed. I can’t help but see my mother staring back at me from my pages.

All my life, I’ve tried not to be like her, my mother. I’ve avoided experiences I believed would lead to one of her tragic endings. How sadly ironic, that the stories I was trying to forget are the stories that I’ve been unconsciously writing, that I can’t ignore because they make up who I am.

Walker also spoke about the lengths her mother took to transform their, shabby, home into something special, unique and warm, and how this act was her mother’s way of expressing herself. It was a manifestation of her mother’s love: planting an ambitious garden. It was, also, a reflection of her mother’s artistic abilities. This has opened my eyes to my own mother’s ambitious gardening.

When I was a kid, I never considered what my mother did in our home as a manifestation of her artistic abilities, mainly because it wasn’t something people celebrated

, valued or respected. It was taken for granted, and considered something that women are expected to do. There wasn’t anything special about keeping a home, and raising five children.  Now, as I’m older, I regret that I never recognized and appreciated my mother’s ambitious gardening.

She knew how to make, and keep things beautiful, my mother. Even when she didn’t have the correct tools, she invented her own tools, and her own style which made everything even more special. She had the eye.

I miss her so much. And words can’t bring her back.  Nothing can imagine her back, or  how much I miss her, my mother (My Imaginary Margin).  Especially since she can no longer share in my revelations.  Selfish,yes. Even now, when she’s dead.

I can’t remember exactly when I stopped celebrating Christmas, especially since it was such

a huge deal for my mother. She’d go the extra mile, staying up all hours of the night on Christmas Eve, redecorating with new curtains and bedsheets.  The smell of freshly painted steps, and polished furniture swelled throughout the house, giving an exciting sense of newness, of home.

And of course the food, the food that was made with my mother’s hands, seasoned with all her love: baked fish, chicken, and stewed pork, macaroni pie, ham, callaloo and beans, and avocado salad; gingerbread, sweet bread, fruit cake, carrot cake, punch de creme (a Caribbean punch made of cream) and sorrel (a Caribbean drink made from the buds of the sorrel plant that grows in the Caribbean) that are boiled with ginger, and then sweetened with sugar, or if you like wine or rum.  Hmm, yum.  The cooking was insane.  As a child, the kitchen was a garden of wondrous smells and deliciousness.

Mother is my substance, whose love I suckle upon
absent of thought to what she is.
Mother is my substance, whose skin is young as mine
even as waters sweeping along oceans and rivers
glowing brownish illuminations as the sun.
Mother is my substance whose personality
I mistakenly guise as funny, and foreign to mine

I’ve noticed in fact, the tendencies to hold my head like mother
my rear end suddenly resembles the roundness of her bountiful rump
and I’ve recently discovered a colony of moles on my neck like mother’s.
My laugh has changed as well into her scandalous octaves
which made you join in with joyous glee
I am reminded everyday of her presence and her legacy.
My mother, my substance, my ambivalent substance.

She talks about distance

When I’ve been born to be alone
I came into this world with my mother
She’s dead now, she left this place
with strangers, who may have cared
about her survival, and what it would
mean, for a a young survivor, but I’m…

Happy Mother’s Day Mom

I wrote this awhile back in tribute of my mother who passed away five years ago.  See previous post here.

Mother is my substance, whose love I suckle upon
absent of thought to what she is.
Mother is my substance, whose skin is young as mine
even as waters sweeping along oceans and rivers
glowing brownish illuminations as the sun.
Mother is my substance whose personality
I mistakenly guise as funny, and foreign to mine

I’ve noticed in fact, the tendencies to hold my head like mother
my rear end suddenly resembles the roundness of her bountiful rump
and I’ve recently discovered a colony of moles on my neck like mother’s.
My laugh has changed as well into her scandalous octaves
which made you join in with joyous glee
I am reminded everyday of her presence and her legacy.
My mother, my substance, my ambivalent substance.

Chapter 2

This is the second installment to the novel I’m trying to write, finish… You can read the first chapter here.

In the dream, I can only see the back of her body, rocking from side to side on what looks like Serena’s bed. I suddenly realize my legs bending, shaking as a feeling of urgency runs through them. A feeling so deadly, crossing my path as I timidly approach the room. I can’t see if it’s really my mother, but somehow I know it’s her. I’ve seen her like this before, beaten down, frazzled, afraid. She’s lying there in this strange arrangement of a room, where the bed is the only furniture. I want to say something, but I can’t. I have no voice when I open my mouth, or maybe it’s because I’m a coward, afraid of what she might bawl. I just stare at her lying there like a child. And I want to cry as well, I can feel the heaving coming up as I try to force it down. “Say something,” but I can’t.

She turns to me, and I immediately close my eyes. Somehow it would all be real if I look. I won’t witness the dust she blows into my face. I’m too afraid to do anything now. So very still I stand, in midair it seems. When I finally open my eyes again, she’s still rocking from side to side. She says in a small voice, so very small, I can barely recognize those words making those sounds. They’re all jumbled like she’s speaking in tongues:

“Ahcyartakeitnomore. Ahgointogocrazy.”

I’m running now. As fast as I can, I run away, leaving her behind, running faster and faster with long legs extended. I’m running fast up this narrow corridor that never ends. It’s covered in red, in everything that came out my mother’s mouth. With long legs, I’m running so fast to the master bed-room. I know I shouldn’t look back, but I do and all that is there is a large mirror reflecting an image of what looks like the backside of my body rocking from side to side. I turn away and stare at the large wooden door before me. My fingers are long and skinny, nervously reaching for the bronze handle.

My father is resting comfortably with his newspaper covering his upper body with information. The air conditioner hums in the background. And everything that I say out of breath sounds like I’m speaking in tongues.

“Whatdidyoudotomammy?”

He removes his covering and looks at me in so much disbelief, that I wonder if I’m really alive. I’ll wake up if I could just pinch myself.

I must be alive, because I understand every word he says:

“I didn’t do anything to your mother,” His words are so clear. They’re so clear they make me ashamed. As the time when I was eight, and I couldn’t spell beach, and he said, “Big girl like you don’t know how to spell beach, your little brother can spell beach.”

Beach, big girl, beach. And Joshua was all pleased as he sang in his five year old voice, B E A C H. The door slams behind me, as I leave the room.

At the other end, down the corridor, my mother is speaking in tongues, “Ahcyartakeitnomore. Ahgointogocrazy,” a sound so quiet but still manages to shake the corridor’s walls. And I could hear him saying, “I didn’t do anything to your mother. You can’t spell beach. Spell beach. B E A C H.” Their voices compete, growing in volume; they pound against the walls, and I lose the muscles in my legs. I cover my ears and as I look down, there’s nothing but a black abyss beneath me. I begin to fall.

That’s when I wake up, when I start to fall. It happened again tonight, today. It’s been happening for weeks now. The same dream night after night. As soon as I close my eyes, I dream that she dies. My mother. I haven’t told anyone, not even Serena. It would scare her, believing that dreams can tell the future. But then again, they say when you dream of someone dying the translation is marriage. It must mean someone is about to get married. A little part of me still participates in superstition. I tell myself it’s foolishness as I feel the cold and try to remember where I am.

Yaya isn’t sleeping down by my legs, and I don’t hear the fish tank. This isn’t Regan’s apartment, I wonder about it for awhile. I wait for Yaya to come lick my feet, but she doesn’t. Everything becomes entangled as I try to readjust, and forget all that I saw in the dream. It becomes an impossible task as I listen and hear a woman singing an intoxicating song. I want her to stop her singing, but she continues:

I want to give you a dream that no one has given me

Remember when we found misery, we watched her

Watched her spread her wings and slowly fly around our room

And she asked for your gentle mind.

“I know her voice,” I say out loud. “Blonde Red Head’s Misery is a Butterfly,” I keep repeating. The song swells, and I begin to recognize shapes. I know these lifeless walls staring back at me. They’re without pictures, posters full of ideals, only white washed unmarked walls, plagued with roaches in the background. I look around and I’m startled by a pile of clothes resembling a tall man with feathers in the corner.

Nearing the song’s climax, I realize my state: lying on a ransacked mattress in my apartment. I wonder why I’m naked. The sun has already set, and I can see the deadly softness in the way the snow falls, collecting. Everything smells like ashes. As I shiver for the comforter resting at my legs, I remember waiting to board the bus at Union Station in D.C. The cold wind eating through my jeans.

I aged during the twenty-four hours. I feel it most as I try to get up off the mattress, and why it’s now difficult to walk to the kitchen without breaking down half way. I remember doing the show at the Warehouse Next Door and drinking rounds of tequila with Smurz and Regan, then, staggering onto a Greyhound at 3:30 this morning. I still see the red from the curtain from the dream, as new events that are not new at all come to mind. The shock, and I gasp, of seeing royal white feathers ruffling aggressively. I shake my head and everything becomes a messy ache of nausea, of too much unsettled on my stomach. I try to keep my head up as some of last night throbs its way back slowly.

When I open the fridge, I have to cover my eyes, blinded by Christmas lights in a darken backdrop–the Warehouse Next Door’s stage. I remember the band before us having a good set. I remember a piece, a scene I have to say shut up to more than once, running so fast, threatening to reveal itself completely like it did on the platform for the R train.

I was listening to The Streets’ “It’s Too late” on repeat, waiting for the R at Port Authority to take me to Lexington Ave for the 6. Monday morning’s rush hour, with so many crammed next to each other. Walking too far, feeling the wind gust of the train’s arrival, I found a dead end of shirts and ties that might topple over the yellow edge leading to the tracks. I began to sweat, and my dark shades fogged up. Nervously, I took another gulp of the coffee I spiked after the rest stop in Delaware–the morning’s glare, unbearable to look at, as the abandon buildings and the trees, burden with snow, raced by. Some of it spilled onto my coat. My hands were shaking from the nightmare I tried to drown: the demons coming uninvited. I tried not to argue aloud with them. With my shoulders caving in, I hid in pockets of shade as they mischievously exposed, giving a second life to, events I’d like to forget.

The 6 violently raced out of the tunnel, jagged apartment buildings urgently streaking through the glaring mirrors. My jaws tightened as I bit down hard on my lower lip, as the shock of seeing Pieta kissing someone else consumed everything.

We were playing the one ballad in the set, and I had lost control. Unbearable to look at–the memory of last night, lingering long after I have closed my red eyes. I moved to another car in the train, and all I saw was an audience staring back at me, knowing I had lost control.

I needed a distraction, an ambitious effort, trying to stop the images from walking through the plastic ads. Feeling the sharpness of the sunlight, all I saw was Pieta in the front row with Rickie Favors. I lost the timing and Smurz began her solo early. Regan glared at me why, as she began to sing:

We’d forget the love laws

for one night

for one night feel the ache

feel the pain in our curves

you’ll show me where

show where it hurts the most

I punched the car window hoping I could break the spell, embarrass myself into the present. But it was already too late, the stupid question I asked Pieta kept repeating itself, “So how was it? So how was it?” It rang in my ears, alongside Regan’s haunting vocals:

We’d forget our tongues

caught in Reason

drawing a line

drawing a rigid line

we’d refuse such a sentence

to lie down with

My walk was slanted, trying to catch myself before I fell too far down. My shoulders were lost in awkwardness, smashing into everything. I tried to outrun the memory of her full pink lips answering the stupid question. I protected my ears from the indifference in her voice. It moved with me anyway. From car to car, I heard her saying, “It was nice. It was nice.”

listen from the pit speaking

speaking a new nonsense

in a moment we’d lose

we’d lose everything

we didn’t have anything but skin

the salt from our eyes

the sadness in a kiss.

Staring at the Brita in the fridge, I remember the pieces that are meant to hurt the most. I notice a red dot on the floor. Tasting my own blood, I feel my lower lip.

I can’t remember how I found my way, walking through the after-math of the weekend’s blizzard for five blocks to my apartment building.

It’s 6:30pm. My phone beeps. I have four new messages, all of them from Gary, asking why I didn’t show for session today. I reach for my jeans covered with the crust of dirty melted snow at the legs. The liquor store will still be open.

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My Imaginary Margin

How do you do it?

When they’re no longer there
for you create lines around
Don’t step over my imaginary margin
for them to keep as a keepsake.
But you regret the edge you drew
the last words you said
because that’s the only map
you can remember. All I have left

Nothing is what you sleep with
when there’s no comfort in a comma
lingering between articles of linear ethics:
imitates my heart beat
cacophonies made into a sentiment.
etching out a personal war, evaporating quickly into ashes

Everything available in an exclamation mark
could never relieve the never ending plummet of being too late
no relief comes calling out to Jesus
once you’ve discovered, in every single hereafter moment
your mother’s death
when you haven’t had that chance.
the comforting trust of peace
And without any truth, you still holler
in a vain attempt at charity, you instinctively cry
the first name you’re suppose to love.
when I haven’t had anything good to say
I never tied my tongue to a subtle lisp
I did more than just say, Fuck it.
Because I’ve won this way.
I’ve won wars marking the uncertain
the uncertain undercurrents
with boundaries built on air.

Indifferent verses
separated by too many dashes
the difficult full stop
making belief a handbook
a trail to finger trace
a metronome to keep a beat
a monotonous puncture in a sum
of all you’ve ever been
You the Zombie.