Monday, August 23, 2010

Hometown is Homesick (prompt from Rose)

Home is a place, 
place is space paused in moment,
moment is emotion rubbed into memory

Home for me feels like a fleeting moment 
And lost memory
In a space I am not sure can exist anymore 

My homesickness is hometown
I am permanently displaced 
always half departing venue of
supposedly human 
and supposedly woman

I am not sure why I was brought here

My spirit still has charred pieces from the transition
My body beaks down often from the traveling, the moving
The manifestation of my awkward keeps moving to pretend there is somewhere to go 
as if I have not been lost since offset,
since origin

Maryland
Born
a place a year too far away for me to draw memories into it's distance
I cannot remember who me is
And so, have no whereabouts as to who or where she was

I have lost notions of the place that taught me loss, it is where i keep my dead history, the death in my history 
As if, unlike me, it will stay there

DC
Is forgotten self made and divinely declared home
Loves me like a betraying grandmother
Or some other mystic kin
Maybe a swinger aunt
A husband with amnesia,
I am told that we have history 
But I don't remember what it was like to love you

I see the photographs and poems that prove we have been places together
But can't remember those feelings
I cant help but feel like I am living in someone elses house

Nigeria
Made
Me a child of missing centuries before the wombing 
We still hold on to the few things that time and space and men with prophetic names like "Lord" divied us
It must not miss me like it did before it unlearned how to
And is the murderous mountain from which my rolling avalanche of travel fell

All of these are places that have changed despite me
Have become dismissive emotionally disrespectful memories lost to big pockets dug deep enough to fit big buildings and needed bodies 

If I had learned nothing of home
in people, in memories and emotion
I would not know anything of loss

I am from every city that asks to be missed for the sake of evidence that someone knew it once

The nostalgia floating to the top of any land with the top layer of it's skin burning it unrecognizable

This,
Is the stomach churning, the gut wrenching place, moment of degorge in yet to be tacit diasporing,
The homesick I call hometown

One day I will  laugh at the audacity of thinking I could be from "somewhere"
Sending down a thunderstorm from heaven, in earth they will call it an earthquake, or hurricane,
A natural disaster,

This world is not my home.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

10 Questions for a Stranger (Prompt from Jamaica)


“Then his soul is returned to his body, and there come to him two angels who make him sit up and they say to him, ‘Who is your Lord?’"

10 Questions for a Stranger,
10 Questions the Angels Will Ask You

1.When you were younger

did you think you could fly?

Can you?


2.When was your birth,

or creation,

the one that required you die first.

How many times did it happen,

can, will it happen again?

Will you spoke plug yourself

into the churning of a failing world

knowing there will be spinning,

For no good reason, maybe.


3.Where is your Grandmother,

granddaughter, at this exact moment,

in your body.


Could I speak with her?

What will she say about you?


What kinds of things will be said about you by legacy?


4.When was the last time you had an untellable feeling,

an emotion with no name?

What color was it,

are you, when you are lonely?


Do you crowd your pain before or after?

Are you a welcoming surrender

or a warring wait?


Would you mind if someone sat with you,

And asked the place you were

the first time something hurt you?


If the walls shook, the shelves too

and if anything fell on you.


5.Have you ever longed to tell a stranger

you love them? In an elevator maybe?


Have you ever found intimate

the closing space between you.

Wanted to cut the throat of the distance in you.

Chip your doubt over it, strum it like a harp.

Turn it breathing hole, and mouth it flute.


Air waiting to be cradled in your healing,

your hospital bed tongue

and its unfurling pink sheets.


6.If you are old and African

Or any other skin sheathing

of lost Gods and vacant history

Do you smile, cry ever?

Are you afraid to, or simply above such human faulting?


7.What do you think of skin?

Our see through bones, and creaking entries.

Our spoiling frames and overused doorways.

What of when it has a tint?


8.What exactly is love to you?

Is it morphine shot and opiate at all?

Can the spell be found foul needle

in your hands.


Who taught it to you?

Do you know someone taught it to you,

And them to?

Have you relearned it,

taken out the excess liquid and discoloring,

made it less dead.


Or is a laziness disheartening you.


9. Of that cocooning coffin body

will you show the loss?

What catastrophe has stolen,

the discarded arteries covered in tattering wishes.


Will you reveal the parts that have been hidden out of fear

So no pieces will be missing

when it is time for us to bury you.


The not so “extra” questions that were almost lost


9. Do you believe in fate?

Because you are assured this world

is set in something good for you?

Or because you are sitting, waiting

for life to happen to you?


9. Are you religious?

Do you spend more time praying in temples

or building them?


9. Are you starving, how hungry are you?

are your intestines coiling like a snake

Is there ever venom in your action, Lucifer in your want?

Do you think we fell out of heaven

or that we were banished?

What would you do to feel like something God made again?


10. Are you one of us,

Are you sure?

Are you sure,

You can’t fly?



Sunday, August 8, 2010

EGBE OMO ISOKUN

NATIONAL YORUBA CONVENTION...

It is a room full of crowded diaspora
with the American anthem playing,

silence
like no one knows the words


It is the Yoruba anthem I first heard when I was EIGHT
still making me cry

It is his daughter
a man who is 60

his daughter,
13 stubborn and unfriendly

adjusting his shirt

without saying a word

like she is his father

Habeebi

Ever write a poem for/about someone and realize it doesn't skim?
This doesn't skim...
Im going to sit down with my muses and live through it and then let it happen to me instead of try to make it happen through me.

I love you.


For Sadia, who held me in a green field, sang ‘Yellow’ and cried with me


I have always wanted to cry as pretty as you do.
Shed water and light at the same time
Pour and glow transpire a rainbow,

Emit
Through plains of dark and shaken nowhere
Every color stolen from us
And hidden in some wrong cavity

Do you see sun in me?
Are you forgetting about the water?
that you are spilling brim and dam split
cleansing
That your head is pouring somewhere near your eyes

Find the narcissus in you,
See for once
That you are simmering rays and golden
See the gold in you
Watch what you’ve guarded so dearly
Admire all of it
Guard but don’t hide it

Though I am ether tarnished treasure or blackened foil
and you love me
Do not let anyone
Rot iron
or lime you

You are a perched sun nights
When I do not want moon hole and sinking feet

Thank you
for blocking out evening
and skipping morning
for being zenith and high noon

Mercy filled baptism
You are no fountain,
Not recycled water

You are falls and pottery wheel
overflowing
clay and sand hands
pedaling feet

Held me yearned creation though I made your work muddy

Kiln
how are you still not water logged hearth

Who made you
All heat no burn
All liquid no drowning

This world
Eggshell promises
and
Unimagined heavens

I don’t know how is it I have still found one in you.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

What God Looks Like to Me

Two days ago I had a conversation with the love of my life Jamaica Osorio ... in my head. I have been asking myself recently about overused words (and structures) in my poetry. All to challenge my language, my craft, my heart. One such overused word is "God" an other religious rhetoric. Reminding myself that words are symbols, I am selling mine so short of what they represent. I want my words to be less symbolic more merging, more transcendent.

Nevertheless, this resulted in,in my head, my love challenging me. Asking, as if in response to reading a piece I have written, since i mention "god" so much in my poetry...what is it that god looks like to me.
My response was the following...




A fiery night turned scorched evening in Brooklyn
A homeless person stands over
a hallowed turbine canister for heat

A man, wall street all three piece suits
And shoe sole covered
with other peoples dreams
walks over freezing

The homeless man shifts over
Never even looking up
They stand over the fire
Both shivering

Neither of them saying a thing

That is what God looks like to me

Friday, August 6, 2010

10 Things That Remind Me of A Thunderstorm (freewrite)

Got this via my beloved soulmate Anwar Jabari Johnson


10 things that remind me of a thunderstorm

1.
Ancestors falling
from their avalanche of wander woes
gripping to the roof of her mouth for heaven
afterlife

My mother's voice
the lioness she taught me to fear
...being.

Mane slipped into its aftermath,
the depth of her transmutable story
causing unknowing listeners to call her
"MR" Yussuf
like they know how shes been my father

2.
Our lips meeting for the 1st time
the passion that made everything messy
Have you ever clutched a storm in your arms before?
Tamed it?
Are you sure
Minilik?

3.
An unnumbered summer
2008
Where some girls began shedding their skin together,
learned to stop being ashamed
of how they had shared it together.
No one told you you looked this good naked

4.
A bag of Italian leather shoes and suits
that always seemed better buys than
formula, or juice, or school fees
or marriage counseling.
My older sister at 15
rolling his belongings down the stairs
right after calling the police

5.
the night when it began to become clear
that little girls do not grow into 18 year olds
that hate men for no reason.
That there had been clouds beneath her eyes breaking
not high enough to forget what happened
That the fogs and opaque bottles full
of blackouts and drowning
the nights when alcohol found prescriptions
readable, understanding,...friendly
Had all
never been for no reason

6.
The day they realize
they did not welcome a daughter back properly
When a whole country
will rise above itself
into the frame of what
its dislocated daughter
has always viewed it to be...
My the cheering

7.
Dec 2009
A doctor saying something
about a lung collapsing
A prayer in a hospital bed
that means nothing
In a room she is sharing with a woman who is 90
A 19 yo realizing, again, she is dying

8.
A quiet night in Chicago
at the most recent BNV
When something is happening
that shouldn't be
Pathetic attempts to regain agency
Have you no idea what type of woman
you want to be anymore?
Are you looking for her
by finding
everything you don't want to be

9.
"that night" "that summer"
I had a vision of my deceased sister walking towards me

10.
"finishing"
the sound of breaking to begin again
pretending you've lived already

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

"Muslim Jews & Christians war, no one's left to praise the Lord"
knaan