Monday, August 23, 2010
Hometown is Homesick (prompt from Rose)
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)
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
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
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
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)
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