A Way Back

Tornadoes follow me, unsettled.
Provoking, threatening my home.
Ripping. Exposing.
My home is missing walls now .
Windows . . . gone . . .
and yet the door still stands.
Open it and feel welcome.
The rain feels nice. Really.
The stars light our path.
Our path -- our path is so
predictable that I am constantly surprised
when you come near.
You come near and I spew lines,
rehearsed lines out of sink . . .
out of time . . . innocent.
And my home becomes a path out of sink.
And so I`ll try not to change that.
Timeless, I fly . . .
searching for my innocence.

Hope

Bland boards of concrete wall
squeeze around old stone
slowly suffocating his-story.
Hungy eyes quenched,
branding coca-cola ads.
And the pink and the green,
planted between perfect lines,
will grow and grow and grow.
Spreading sidewalk cracks,
pushing against the shade,
reaching for that light above,
reminding us how.
~Dedicated to F.

An Ode to Cheetos

When I kiss you, I want to taste like cheetos.
Well, what I really want is a crazy strong powerful storm to be going through.
I want winds from the east, rains from above, clouds underneath. Hmmm.
I want my hair flying, free in circles, clashing with your face --
a single dread called us.
Fires are blown out, windows are chattered, the sand hitting our bodies.
I want to be unbalanced alone but balanced with you . . . when we kiss.
But I`ll settle for cheetos.

Here, With Myself

My joints are shaking again
from the endless cutting,
from the screams held down
in my insides, begging to be
realeased into the silence.
I want to run but someone
smeared glue all over the
pavement, on my face,
between my toes, under my
armpits and onto this seat.
I shake, I scream, I run
inside my mind, inside
my eyelids and still I
am here, with myself.
Cannot escape my inner
monster nor my inner angel.
They are my shadows and
I am the clouds in the sky.

I found a file named "pixel" on the computer

thought it was funny?!

Pie-chart of Procrastination

Thanks Demetri Martin

Passing Memory

I see you -- in passing,
sometimes behind closed doors,
Sometimes from miles away.
I feel you -- in passing,
sometimes a slight breeze as you walk by,
sometimes a long distance word melting down my back.
I hold you -- in passing,
sometimes a rushed embrace before you exit,
sometimes in dreams.
I have loved you in passing and I want to stand still,
not for a moment, not from across the way.
I want to keep my eyes open and stare at you,
studying,
memorizing,
breathing in your figure,
your lines,
your perfume.
The distance will come,
and the walls,
and the silence.
I close my eyes to love the memory.

The Shoe-shiner Boy

He is probabely twelve, but his forehead frowns way past his age. His cold look stares into nothing, frozen, waiting. He keeps his eyes down, searching for his next coin reflected in leather . . . any color would do. He spots a prospect and slowly matches his footsteps . . . maybe he´ll turn around, maybe.
The main plaza is his main home, the four corners are his cell and if he escapes for a moment, the small jingle in his left pocket reminds him to return. He carries the shoeshine in his right, and the shoe stool in his left. The light clothes he wears have turned gray and his sandals look thin. He sees a man hesitate, look down, inspect his shoes, and motion for a shine. He approaches quickly, before the taller boy notices, ready to repeat his last job, a routine his arms have memorized . . . he kneels. He kneels and carefully places the leather on its pedastal . . . first the polish(make sure to get every spot!), then the brush(don´t forget the sides!), then the soiled towel, rubbing, wiping, beating the shine out to the surface(whop, whop, whop!). He looks around the whole time while the man towers over, keeping his gaze below the ankles, always the leather. The final wallops of the towel and a streak of light appears . . . and now the next, the process is repeated. The finale is brought down with a soft sound of change into his hand, delivered safely to his left pocket. He rises, forces a smile, and walks on, hoping for one more.

Chachapoyas, Peru
Plaza de Armas
Painting by Ruben Nava, The Shoe Shine Boy

A Mongolian Creation Myth, A Love Story

In the words of the Mongolian creation myth: `There came a wild dog who was blue and grey and whose destiny was imposed on him by the heavens. His mate was a roe deer. Thus begins another love story. The wild dog with his courage and strength, the doe with her gentleness, intuition, and elegance. Hunter and hunted meet and love each other. According to the laws of nature, one should destroy the other, but in love there is neither good nor evil, there is neither construction nor destruction, there is merely movement. And love changes the law of nature.
`The wild dog is seen as a feminine creature. Sensitive, capable of hunting because he has honed his instincts, but timid too. He does not use brute force, but strategy. Courageous, cautious, quick. He can change in a second from a state of complete relaxation to the tension he needs to pounce on his prey.
`The roe deer has the male attributes of speed and an understanding of the earth. The two travel along together in their symbolic worlds, two impossibilities who have found each other, and because they overcome their own natures and their barriers, they make the world possible too. That is the Mongolian creation myth: out of two different natures love is born. In contradiction, love grows in strength. In confrontation and transformation, love is preserved.
`In the Mongolian creation myth, doe and wild dog come together. Two beings with very different natures: in the wild, the dog would normally kill the deer for food. In the Mongolian myth, they both understand that they each need the qualities of the other if they are to survive in a hostile world, and that they should, therefore, join forces.
`To do this, they must first learn to love. And in order to love, they must cease to be who they are, otherwise they will never be able to live together. With the passing of time, the wild dog comes to accept that his instinct, always focused on the struggle to survive, now serves a greater purpose: finding someone with whom he can rebuild the world."

Paulo Coelho in The Zahir
Inspired by the Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda who writes about a tradition of forgetting one´s personal history

Realizing your dreams . . .

"The master had a buffalo. The animals´s widespread horns made him think that if he could manage to sit between them, it would be like sitting on a throne. One,day, when the animal was distracted, he climbed up between the horns and did just that. The buffalo, however, immediately lumbered to its feet and threw him off. When his wife saw this, she began to cry.
" `Don´t cry, ´ said the master, once he had recovered. `I may have suffered, but I also realized my dream.´ "