mentality: check your soul

SNEAK PEEK: A Case for White Relationship Divestment, Part 2

2015-03-06T12:23:00.001-08:00

MY RELATIONSHIPS WITH WHITE PEOPLE: An Extremely Incomplete Case Study

I am a 35 year-old light-skinned, lower middle class, college-educated, mostly masculine-presenting, non-black person of Mexican and Ilokano descent. The point of these vignettes is not to prove how victimized I have been. It is meant to help you all understand why a person like me, who honestly has not had it all that bad compared to some, would feel the need to go through cycles of white relationship divestment, one from 2002 – 2006, this current one since 2009. This timeline fails to show you that my divestment is also an effort to focus on living in solidarity with POC who have had it worse than me. It may give you some inspiration for how to interact with the problematic white people in your lives.

1979 -1984

The only white people I know I can count on one hand: 1) my brother’s girlfriend; 2) my second cousin, who is blond and blue-eyed and who has one grandparent who is a sometimes white-passing Latina; 3) my sometimes white-passing auntie’s white husband. Up to this point, white people and their everyday lives and customs are something I know about by watching TV.

TO BE CONTINUED ON 3/13/15 at nicodacumos.com...

If you get something useful/good/entertaining out my work, support my future work with a $2 - $2000 contribution.

Columbus Day 2014

2014-10-17T21:32:00.000-07:00

Yes—
You, Who Forsook Your Homeland.

No amount of land
will ever fill the emptiness
of your forever-starving belly

No amount of blood-of-Others
will feed your dying heart
and bring you to pulsing warmth

No thing you steal
or desecrate—

land
language
culture
resources
knowledge
balance
peace
Oneness
magic
divinity
sacredness
Life—

will belong to you.

-Nico Dacumos

Resurrector's Lament

2014-07-07T14:19:00.001-07:00

How many more layers can I shed?

My skin burnished red glowing

like flame, nerve endings raw

with the knowledge

of all that lays beneath

This agony of reemergence

Yields sheets and sheets of thin detritus

Brittle evidence of pain

That melts on my tongue

Like rice paper

I lay exhausted and aching

Even as I continue to grow

My tender flesh drinking deeply

From my heart's blood

To nourish this newest rebirth

I sometimes hate myself

For insisting on survival

Refuse sustenance

Leave nothing to feed the layers that

spontaneously birth beneath my skin

But something inborn

Feeds me despite myself

Until I overflow

A river of life force
Rising past my own shores

La llorona del pueblo

2014-05-23T12:18:00.000-07:00

Dona Margarita sits in the town square

Kitty corner to the dama de noche

Across from the butcher

Below the brothel

Beneath the eyes of God

And cries

Every day for all things

For the loss of her sons

For the loss of her husband

For the loss of her mother

For the losses of her forebears

For the losses of her species.

Pay her a few coins

And she’ll cry for you too

Place her crooked fingers

And too rough palms

Over the tender skin

Of your hairless chest

Pull despair from your heart

Clutch you close like she’s the Madonna

And you are her son

Until tears flow from both your eyes

And sobs wrack your ribcage

And the dama de noche weeps perfume

And the butcher cries as he slits a chicken’s throat

And the whores cry as they ride sobbing men

And the cobblestones seep with tears

And the earth shakes from the rending

And the town gasps deep from the cleansing

Ready to store suffering in the armory

Until she cries again.

Poet's Prayer

2014-04-22T17:07:00.001-07:00

May my words hold your breath

in beauty

May my breath exhale truth

burn guilty ears

May my tongue unfold pages of history

slip serpentine strike down lies

May my prophecies nourish

coat the tongue tart and honeyed

May my dreams reap a litany

the sweet and succulent fruits of the field

May my hands move pages endlessly

the beginning and the end

Godly

Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines

July 2008

A Love Letter: March 30, 2009

2014-03-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

S,

[Readacted]

Love,
Nicomedes

SOME WORDS TO SAY AS PRAYER

I am perfect and whole and broken and fractured, but above all, beautiful. So beautiful in my embodiment of Everything/Chaos/Existence that Death has swooped in to make me his bride, his dark cape encircling me and obscuring my sight.

My mother will not mourn me nor will I mourn myself. I do not need my true love to lead me out of the Underworld. I myself know the way. It is my choice to walk out into the light. I may leave and return to Death at will, feel her hot kiss as the whim strikes me.

May I know the deliciousness of life and eat of it daily.

May I look in the mirror and think, Who is that handsome devil, and who ever knew I could love her?”

May I eat from the rubied seeds of a pomegranate, become drunk with Forgetfulness of Who I Was, and give birth to Memory of Who I Shall Be.

May I enter a room smelling of desire and hot earth touched by the sun. Moreover, may I shine and radiate with the bright heat of the stars themselves, my planets of lovers orbiting about me with adoration.

ADDITIONALLY,

It is absolutely vital that you be able to be comfortable naked. Even if it begins in defiance, if you think, Fuck you; this body is mine and I will own every inch of skin that has carried me through this life thus far. You cannot make me feel ashamed. Look at me and know your own fear and shame. Look at me, desire me and be saved from your own self-destruction.

EVENTUALLY,

It is absolutely vital that you be able to look at yourself, naked, in the mirror and think that what you see is beautiful and the fucking hottest thing anybody could ever get their hands on. Including yourself.

Imagine the most self-indulgent, narcissistic statements possible and say them to yourself out loud as you look at yourself.

Some of my favorites are:

"Damn, I look fine!"

"I know my WORTH."

"My [insert body part/s] look/s hella hot."

Anti-Black Racism: A Family Legacy

2014-03-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Aura Bogado.

Content Warning: Anti-black racism, intimate partner violence, drug use, involuntary abortion

Anti-black racism may be the reason that my family fell apart when I was between 10 and 22 years old.

I didn’t know that at the time though. All I knew was that my parents had come to hate each other. Up until then, they seemed to be passionately in love. Sometimes they fought and there was screaming and it was volatile, but they always made up pretty quickly.

But at ten years old and onward all I knew was that there was constant screaming and crying, the sound of fists hitting flesh that I could hear through the walls between my bedroom and theirs. My mother broke everything in the house and then broke those broken things into smaller pieces. My father often had scratches all over his body, his face. My mother tried to kill herself and ended up in a mental institution.

They didn’t want me to see all this so they sent me to my brother and sister, who are 11 and 13 years older than me. My siblings lived together, along with my brother’s white girlfriend. They rented the house in San Diego that my parents had bought in the 70s.

My time with my siblings was supposed to be less violent, but it wasn’t. My brother and his girlfriend were addicted to crack and would fight just as horribly. I remember one night while they rampaging in the house my sister took me outside and we sat on the steps. I was scared. She was angry. She was also checked out, though. Absent.

My sister was always checked out from my family. I got the feeling she couldn’t wait to get away. It made me sad because as a child I couldn’t help but take her distance personally. I loved her and looked up to her so much.

But I decided to take my cue from her. I checked out from my family too. The music from my headphones and the books in my hands became my family, became my world. I disappeared with them every chance I could get.

This went on for years, into college. My memories of when things happened and what happened are spotty. Cuz, like I said, I wasn’t really there.

But I do know at some point, in the midst of rage and sadness, at an age that was too young for me to be hearing about it, my mother told me everything.

How it all started with my sister and the boy she loved. A black boy. How she got pregnant. How she told my dad she was pregnant. How my dad told her that if she had that child he would not be welcomed in his house. How my sister got an abortion because she feared the loss of my father’s love more than she feared losing her baby or her boyfriend. How it created a gulf between my mother and my father. How my mother felt that she no longer knew who my father was anymore. How she pulled away from him. How she thinks that is why he started seeing another woman. How that was the reason she lost her mind and tried to kill herself.

This is my family’s legacy of anti-blackness. I could tell you about the healing and the talking that has happened since then. And also the silence and the burying. But this is enough for me, for now. This is the first time I am articulating all these things on a page. All this is is a beginning.

...Donde quepan

2014-03-11T23:53:00.002-07:00

Illustration cred

Many worlds traveled

Many eons crossed

Lifetimes skipped hopped swirled

Music of the galaxies

Record needles scraping round planetary rings

We danced and the beat was syncopated

We danced and the beat was heart murmur

We danced and the beat was breath stopped

Dropped to our knees

Prayed for rain on planets

Much drier than this one

Thirsted in deserts colder

Than those of my grandmothers

Desire stretched wide

Multiplied by every horizon

My soul has ever seen on every world

My bodies have ever called home

Expelled from homeland

So many times it's common as dirt

Carried everything on my back

So long it’s become a part of me

Tortoise-old island unto myself

And every time you offer

To carry some of the weight

You have to coax it from my back

With the strong tips of your fingers

Dig in and knead my burden free

Bring it to the surface like bodies floating

And bury them beneath the trees

Note to Self #2,012 (Anti-Misogyny)

2014-02-05T14:30:00.001-08:00

"smile now cry later undone" by henry funches

Note to Self:

If you are a man working* for anti-misogyny, there will be consequences**.

Other men (cismen, transmen, butches, studs, dudes, etc.) will isolate you.

They will avert their eyes when you speak the truth.
They will tell you the truth is a lie, or at least, should never be spoken.
They will punish you when you take action.
They will expel you from their circles.
They may try to affect your life materially - economically, physically (violence).

In effect, they will turn their misogyny on you.

They will make you less than human (though that might already be the case if you are a person of color, have a disability, are queer, are an immigrant, are transgender, are poor).

If you consider yourself a feminist or anti-misogynist and do not experience at least some of the effects of misogyny turned against you, you might be doing it wrong.

*By working, I mean speaking truth to or challenging misogynists. By working, I mean taking concrete action. By working I mean giving something up.

**These consequences, and many others, are what someone who identifies or is identified as a woman or feminine experience on a daily basis without relief.

Similar consequences follow for doing work around racism, anti-black racism, classism, abelism, xenophobia, colorism, etc.

Part of doing the work to end an oppression is diverting some of the energy that oppressors put on the oppressed onto yourself, by speaking up or taking action.

By being a traitor.

Because oppressor recognize oppressor.

Because as long as you are recognized as being a part of that oppressor identity you will reap its benefits.

Because through struggle you might influence a fellow oppressor to become a traitor with you.

Love List #1

2014-01-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

Intimacies other than fucking* (a partial list):

1. Sharing a common experience, such as joy, and being moved to tears together by it.

2. Eye contact that conveys words, feelings and/or touch between the intimate parties.

3. Witnessing a natural occurrence such as the sky streaking meteors, the sight and sound of waves crashing or the radiance of the moon with someone/s while simultaneously engaging in physical contact such as hugging, holding hands, spooning.

4. Allowing one's light, darkness and shade to reflect in the eyes of others without** or despite fear of rejection or punishment.

5. Taking in words of praise from the giver and allowing them to take root in the heart; believing them.

6. Laughing at something together; the type of laughing that throws you to the ground, takes your breath, draws tears.

7. Sharing tender and/or minute details of your life, laying them bare for others to examine, digest, give honest opinion, feedback, forgiveness.

8. Taking responsibility for wrongdoing and making amends.

*Fucking is not always intimate, but may it be should you wish it so. Also, fucking is a subjective term.
** Children begin life especially adept at creating this and all other types of intimacy until it is trained out of them.

Texts I Never Sent #14

2013-12-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

I told you goodbye and then we hugged, the hug unfolding into a firmer pressing together of bodies. I heard you make a noise somewhere between a moan and a grunt and then we pulled ourselves apart, a quick rending. As I walked away, I was momentarily delirious with the delicious energy that sparks between us when we touch. And then the spark set me afire and I felt the thrill of all manner of alternate universes.

One where I didn't leave, but instead followed you back inside, had a drink (water) with you and found more things to talk about that were not about how much I adore you, how your smile, the glee on your face were the brightest things I'd seen all week, that were not about how I wanted to taste your tongue twisted around mine, tart sweet with what you're drinking (pineapple juice?), that were certainly not about how I wanted us to go outside and fuck in the driver's seat of my car, the windows going steamy from our cries and exhalations. And then after we had not talked about all those things, I would leave, still burning.

Another reality where I crossed the street to reach my car and you called my name and ran to catch up to me. We stood on the corner facing each other, smiling into each other's eyes until we broke out into laughter. "This is the stupidest idea ever!" I exclaimed, sending us into new eruptions of mirth. You reached over and placed the flat of your palm over the middle of my chest, leaning and clutching as if you were using me to brace yourself against the onslaught of your laughter. Your forehead came to rest just above your palm and I could feel the tremors of your laughing in my breastplate as I clutched you to me for a moment. Then I grabbed you by the sides of your arms and pushed you upright with comic exaggeration, giving you one steadying squeeze before stepping back and waving goodbye, our smiles luminescing into the night.

And then there is this world, where what happened was that I drove home incandescent with want and buzzing everywhere. Imagining, imagining. And what happened then is that my desire recited verses as I rounded the corner to my house. And so I ran inside and recorded it all, here and elsewhere.

Texts I Never Sent #113

2013-11-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

{Picture Attachment: photo.jpg} [Description: An image of a man taking a full-length selfie, wearing nothing but a pair of red boxer briefs, forearm clutched to his chest like he wields a shield, trapping his breasts to give the bodily impression he most dreams of. He is reflected in an oval-shaped floor mirror, face defiant as if to say: yes, this is the real fucking me.]

This Time

2013-11-06T20:11:00.001-08:00

Delusion

Desolation

Disillusion

Dissolution

Sinking

Continental shelves

Blackness

Where nothing

Dwells

Life

Begin again

Anti-gregorian

Insurgent

Gracious

Dangerous

Delicate

Skeleton key

To the cosmos

Draped in stars

Guadalupana

Triumphant

Basic

Fundamental

At the center

Prayer hands

Pyramids

Basins overflowing

Milk and honey

Libations

Ancestors

Answers

That are Echoes

Forever

Home

2013-10-29T23:27:00.002-07:00

Same old fucking story

Bout being lost

Bout how even if you weren’t lost

You’d have noplace to go

Bout how even when you go someplace

It’s only temporary

Bout how home

Isn’t even your body

Ain’t even somebody else’s body

Same old shit

Makes me want to vomit

And scream

And cry

And rage

Snotty wailing tantrums

Mouth wide open

Like the serpent

That eats itself

Until there’s nothing left

An empty space

A black hole

Devouring galaxies

But never fed

Reverberating out

But never getting anywhere

Just here and here and here

And now and now and now

And breath

And eyes closed

And in

And I

These Days

2013-07-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

Gotta be superheroes these days

Gotta leap tall buildings

to get away from bad guys

Fly so fast you make the earth spin in reverse

So that this backwards ass world makes sense

Time travel during your lunch break

To escape what’s happening now

Part the seas like it’s your hairline

So you can walk into the deepest trench and

Pull the ocean over your head like a forgetful blanket

Build a spaceship out of cardboard boxes

And get the hell out of here

Forget your childhood like it was your superhero origins

Cuz that’s where all the trouble began

Where the curse of your powers were birthed hand in hand

With their blessings

But none of us are superheroes

And there’s more mundane things to be done

Like remembering

Remembering your ancestors

Where you came from

Easy to say but just as impossible

As wrapping some cute lil so and so in your arms

And flying them through the clouds

On your next date

Yeah, remember your ancestors

The ones that hold all the secrets

The ones who know how to do magic

The ones who know how to make you whole

Remember them

Better yet visit them during your lunch break

Ask them how to fix this shit

Or at least how to destroy it

Even though you know they’ll laugh

Cuz it was them who brought you here

Them who longed for the generations

That would birth you to this moment

To this land

This sacred land

This scarred land

This scared land

This land filled with villains

It's them that brought you here

Their wrinkled hands

Their scared hands

Their scarred hands

Their sacred hands

That built things that no longer exist

And some things that do

That died in faraway lands

And some not so far away

So you could be here

Right now

Too damn human

To forget

Chronic Colonialism: Notes from a Survivalist

2013-05-16T23:17:00.000-07:00

For years I have avoided speaking too much on the issues of chronic illness and disease. I realize now that a lot of it has had to do with shame, with the knowledge that if you knew how guilty I am in the destruction of my own body you couldn't possibly have sympathy for my situation.

See, lupus may be my immune system attacking my kidneys and diabetes may be my cells failing to use insulin correctly, but there’s also the ways that I have attacked my own body through inaction, neglect and outright sabotage since birth. These practices are things that I learned from my family. These practices are things my family learned from legacies of colonization:

Accepting the Staples of White Supremacy. White flour and processed sugar. Maiz and beans and fruit genetically modified for hundreds of years to increase their sweetness until they are no longer the foods of our ancestors. The way these ingredients of whiteness were pushed on my peoples through the destruction of our own lands, rebuilding it into something unrecognizable through our own forced labor. Corporate farming past and present. Wartime rations and biscuit lines and public assistance.

(Re)living the Violence of Poverty. Making these staples of white supremacy my family’s only option. My mother remembers that even when there was nothing else, there were stacks of flour tortillas piled at the back of her grandmother’s wood stove, offered to every visitor slathered with manteca. My father remembers hunger, one fish and a bowl of rice to be shared amongst ten children as they fled the Japanese occupation of Manila. Cans and cans of corned beef hash the prize for reaching the American side, eaten until they vomited. My parents swore that no one would ever, ever be hungry again, the cabinets and refrigerators of my childhood home literally stuffed with food. Stuffing ourselves with food that is killing us.

Eating Our Grief and Rage. Eating those staples of whiteness that have somehow become a symbol of home, that are somehow now comforting, so that we come back to them again and again, especially when the weight of racism, body shame, stressful jobs that uphold white supremacist capitalism, and a myriad of other stressors become too heavy. These staples seem to soothe our grief and rage. But really stand in for our grief and rage. Become the grief and rage that we continually feed our bodies instead of releasing them to our gods to consume and carry away.

Self-hate. When society does not value you, how do you value yourself? When society would rather you die, why not do it yourself? A long drawn-out suicide of cigarette smoke to shroud anxiety and quell stress, drugs and drink to blunt the pain, eating whatever because that’s what there is or what feels good, doing everything in your power to help the oppressors bring about the demise of your own mind, spirit, body.

These beliefs and practices possess our bodies, the ghosts of the past making us sick. They are just a few amongst the many that afflict us. All us children of colony sick in some way. Some of us more sick, the canaries in the coal mine, little birds trying to tell you that we are all dying in body, mind, spirit--some more quickly and painfully than others.

Chronic diseases and the ways they limit our ability to live “normal” lives, slow our ability to carry out the plans for collective liberation we have constructed, slow our rolls when all we wanted to do was go out, kick game, enjoy fucking and laughing and playing--the way they bring early deaths for some of us--are as much a symptom of colony as is our continuous destruction of the Earth out of fear and a need to conquer, as are the incarceration and murder of black and brown bodies by the state and its agents. None of these symptoms are comparable or the same, but certainly spring from the same sick system.

What I long for--what I have begun to create--is collective healing and liberation for all of us who struggle with chronic illness. Through self-care that does not celebrate middle-class understandings that mostly call on us to spend money in order to be well. Self-care that is about assessing what we have at our disposal and what is needed. Spreading our resources around. Taking what is needed, by force if necessary. Self-care that is literally about learning to care for ourselves through how we think about and treat our bodies. Learning how to prepare and take in the sustenance of unconditional self-love and love for each other, which includes holding ourselves and one another accountable for doing everything possible in each moment to care for ourselves. Picking ourselves and each other up when we fall down. Loving ourselves and each other for failing and starting again. Growing, making, sharing, fundraising for, bartering and stealing the medicines and treatments we need. Supporting one another by accessing and sharing the tens of thousands of years of collective knowledge increasingly at our fingertips.

Self-care is about knowledge. Knowledge is about time. I have spent hours over many years in libraries and online trying to figure out how best to take care of myself because no one else seems to know, exactly, how to treat a body that has so many things wrong with it--even the acupuncturists, the herbalists, the healers. In the absence of elders in my immediate family who know the old ways I have had books and internet articles. But also friends and healers and scholars with whom I exchange what I know and get new information and things to try. My body is an ongoing experiment. Up until now I was Frankenstein’s Monster, stitched together from pieces of colonial violence and stringed along by a white vision of my purpose: malleable middle class mestizo man, overeducated and content to die slowly, convinced that there is nothing I can do to stop it. These days I feel I am a new Monster entirely, terrible and tender and whole and righteously angry and purposeful. Made powerful by the knowledge that I make choices everyday that hurt or heal my body. Made powerful by my desire to share and spread the information I have culled over the years.

I realize that I have needed each and every one of these years of failure and guilt and shame and research and connection with others to figure out exactly what it is I need to do to take care of my body. I have needed these years of spiritual growth to believe that there is something beyond myself that demands I honor this body that has chosen to house my spirit, rather than try to disassociate from it. I have needed the love, affection and touch of every friend, family member, mentor and lover to help me see that this chubby, mixed, brown, assigned-female-at birth body is sacred and beautiful and absolutely worth preserving. And I am so, so lucky that I have had the time and space to figure these things out, because along the way many others have died.

I cannot abide by my own survival while others die. I still see the empty chair in the office where I used to work, once filled by a 26 year-old African American secretary and advisor for the cheerleading squad who worked herself to the bone and was never allowed the time to give care and attention to herself that a person with lupus needs. I remember my auntie, who did her best to follow the guidelines of her doctors for her diabetes but still ended up on dialysis, with amputations before passing much too young. Countless others--family members, neighbors, strangers who died in so many different ways from illnesses and violences that did not exist before the founding of this supposed “civilization.”

I cannot abide by my own survival while others die. Yet I still live and others still die. Yes, we are all little birds singing of impending doom. But even amongst our flock some of us die faster than others, some of us pass quicker than we need to because we do not have the resources and care to slow our passing.

If the greatest work I can assign to myself at this moment is to survive, then please let us survive side by side. I do not want any of our flock to die before we have honored our bodies and therefore the generations before us and therefore the gods that birthed us. We cannot abide by the survival of some of us while so many others die. Our purpose in life is not to survive alone, but to fly together in a great yellow swarm, our wings radiant against the hot embrace of the sun.

a warning

2013-04-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

our fury

shines hot

blooms bright love

sunflowers

ascending

to the stars

fearing

this radiant rage

speeds

the swiftness

of your

fall

And Now for Something Completely Different... A Recipe!

2013-04-19T03:00:00.000-07:00

How is it that I haven't done recipes before?? Cooking is such a big part of my life. I guess mostly, the thing is, I cook very informally and only consult recipes for suggestion. Unless it's baking, which you can really mess up if you don't follow proportions. Even then I have to at least throw in a spice or an herb or something that's my own touch.

Other thing is, I've been diabetic since I was 17 and in denial about it most of my life. Lately, I've been trying something different, which entails actually PAYING ATTENTION to what goes into my body and seeing how it affects my blood sugars. Imagine that! Which also means that about 75% of the things that used to make up my daily diet are no longer a part of my diet.

But you know there's no way that means I'm not going to eat delicious food. Or things that remind me of the delicious things I used to eat. Or that are even better.

I may defeat my sugar addiction someday and be able to go through the day without eating something sweet, but until I do, these are the kinds of delicious recipes I will share with you:

CHAMPURRADO CON CAFE PARA DIABÉTICOS

Is there anything more soothing than a hot cup of champurrado early in the morning?

1 cup strong, hot coffee OR whatever kind of milk it is you drink (unsweetened almond, coconut, soy, etc. But not cow milk, cuz it has hella lactose, which is basically just sugar)
1 tbs unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tbs coconut oil OR butter
2 tbs coconut milk OR heavy cream (you could leave this out if you did milk instead of coffee, but why miss out on more creamy, fatty goodness?)
1 tbs ground chia seeds
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
1/16 tsp xanthan gum*
1/8 tsp guar gum*
Sweetener of your choice to taste (stevia drops/powder, sugar free chocolate syrup, etc.)

Supplements I add to this champurrado are freeze dried nopal powder and freeze dried aloe flakes. So basically, it is tasty, tasty medicine. Cuz food is medicine and medicine is food.

*These gums help to thicken the liquid quickly so that it is more like champurrado. The chia also does that, especially if you let it sit for about 15 minutes (you could even add an extra tablespoon of chia for more thickening power), so you could leave the gums out. Even though they are from natural sources, they are specialized ingredients that you would need to get at a health food store or online.

DIRECTIONS

Throw all of this into a blender or magic bullet for a little bit OR put it into a sealable container and shake the crap out of it OR make more than one serving and break out that pretty jara and molinillo you have as decoration in your house and actually use it. Drink! Enjoy! You probably won't be hungry for a few hours if you are generally keeping your carbohydrate/sugar intake low and your fat intake high (more on why that makes sense for a diabetic in a future post).

for Ronnie

2013-04-16T10:44:00.001-07:00

me: woman to man
you: man to ancestor

let's cross together

hopscotch thru landmines
like little boys do
heedless of history
aware only of possibility

and sunshine
and grass stained knees
and rock fights

and fraternity as serious
as cigarette burns on purpose

and records spinning
and beats dropping

and beats dropping
and on and on

like we're crossing a border that never ends.

headed to the other side forever.

Hymn for Sogorea Te

2013-04-14T20:53:00.001-07:00

Sogorea Te and Your Children:

Today I give thanks because I am reminded that all that we are, all that is exists only through prayer and ritual, through the original peoples of this world who have not forgotten how to sing the songs, play the instruments, do the dances, do the work that allows this planet to continue spinning.

Thank you for remembering, for carrying knowledge through the millenia, through colonization and death and for bringing it here, to this very day so that we might live.

I give thanks because I have begun to realize that those of us lost to our tribes will soon awaken, will soon join you in prayer, ritual, dance, song, music, and in making things good and right.

Our survival depends on this awakening.

Our healing depends on this awakening.

Our futures depend on this awakening.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

some existential shit for a tuesday morning

2013-04-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

there's no other way to say this:
the world is fucking crazy
and it's always been
everything shakes and crumbles
mountains fall into seas
with a regularity human experience
cannot wrap its head around
everything burns and even our oldest
ancestors never saw the fire
reflected in the black of their eyes

this shit now is minor
gods whose names we don't know
anymore
cried because they saw
this coming
laughed because they saw
this coming

the end is near
the end is near
the end is near
the farthest reaches of time
which never ends anyway

so just fucking stop

and live
and live

and exhiliration
because we are here
in bodies
in flesh
in intimate
relationship to spirit
we feel
and the heart pounds
we feel
and the breath hitches

we feel
and the eyes cry

what more do you fucking want?

What We Are

2013-03-10T01:06:00.000-08:00

What we are is stone gone deaf from waiting

Petrified wood bent at strange angles

Burnt things crushed into new beings

Calcified remains of sea creatures

Once deeply buried beneath seas

Now emerged in open dirt

The better to withstand time

Praying silently for healing

Like the gnarled fingers of grandmothers.

What we are is thousand year-old trees stretched skyward

Progeny of ferns trampled by beasts long extinct

Russet maize whose ancestors were grown by ancestors

Olive pits brought to the New World and planted deep

Heedless of homeland as long as sun shines true and soil is rich

Wanting nothing more than to grow lush and green, stems outspread

To give sustenance to one another

To live again and again

What we are is meteordust gathered gummy at the corner of waking eyes

Celestial elements as yet and never to be named

The blackest reaches where Gods dance stars into being

Dead stars sucking at reality, hungry for embrace

Far removed from the mundanity of love and violence

Still feeling everything deep in the gut

Bellies stretched with millenia of memories

But never ever full

Tribulation (Poem from my 18 or 19 year-old self)

2013-03-08T13:17:00.001-08:00

All the waters of the world flowed here

We wash, a baptism, young girls shirtless

Because their flat chests denote sexlessness

A flatness our heavy chests yearn for in dreams

We ask the cool streams to make clean what is unclean

Not realizing it might carry the debris of an entire world

A certain type of scrub brush grows here by the shore

We use it scrub our skin alive, taking care with

The delicate places between the legs, behind the soft ears

With time we find that some have rubbed themselves raw

With time we see that none of us are cleaner

So some only scrub harder

Those of us who live here notice that something is not right

That the fish have disappeared and even the animals

Fail to come down from the hills to drink anymore

"Let's play astronaut," we tell our black-eyed children

Covering them in yellow plastic suits

Thinking to protect them from contamination

Our men have become cowards in their old age

Weeping into bottles and bottles of liquor

We watch the tears travel the deep wrinkles of their faces

Feeling empty pity because long ago we packed threadbare luggage

And gathered the children, escaping to the shore
Away from men, amongst the filth

In youth, we wondered at the thought that our waters

Encompassed all the world in their silver reflection

We were revolutionaries then

Secrets intimately tangled in our hair

Wisdom trapped like black soot beneath our fingernails

Answers caught like strawberry seeds in our teeth

Surviving Mercury Retrogrades from a Lifelong Child of Mercury

2013-03-06T18:36:00.003-08:00

There's still 11 days left in this Mercury retrograde and the next is in June again anyway, so I thought I would offer some tips. After all, Mercury is my ruling planet all up and down my astrology chart and I think I know a thing or two about dealing with this energy on the regular.

So, since Mercury is all about communication, I think a helpful way to think about retrograde is to compare it to bad cell reception. Now, you can be all trag about it and complain about how bad your reception is or you can just take steps to make it better. That means something as simple as moving to a spot with better reception or going to the most extreme way to solve the problem and changing cell phone carriers. The key is that you are doing something rather than letting frustration, anger, or abject misery take over. Which brings me to the first tip:

1. Practice flexing your perseverance and resilience muscles. You're going to need these skills everyday anyway. All this really means is that you have anywhere from 3 to 5 to 10 ways you are going to solve a problem or make something happen, depending on how big or important the task is. The more important the problem or task is to you, the more ways you have to reach the goal.

Here's a silly example from today: I was trying to post a link. First, I tried the oh-so-handy-looking icon made specifically for linking an article to Facebook. It didn't work. My screen said, "This link could not be found." The fuck? Oh, Mercury, I thought and smiled. So I tried it again, cuz, sometimes, that's all you need to do. Nope. Next, I decided I would simply copy the link and post it manually. Of course, I was doing this on my phone and the site I was getting the link from did not have a way I could figure out to get the permalink for the article. After tinkering, I finally got the permalink. Finally, I was able to copy and past the link and post it. I mean, I coulda just been like, God just doesn't want me to post this, but since I turn into a pit bull about making the weirdest shit work, I just couldn't stop trying every way I knew to make it happen.

Here's a way better example of perseverance and resilience: In the 1960s, after my dad quit his job because he was about to get popped for union organizing in the Philippines, he decided his best bet would be to get a job with the US Navy. This career path required traveling to Subic Bay, the Naval Base about 240 miles from his home in Manila. Applications were only collected once a month. He somehow got the money to travel there by bus but then faced another obstacle: he had arrived early and you were only allowed to spend the night in Subic Bay if you had special papers. So, he hit up an old friend who let him stay for a night until dude started getting too freaked out about getting found out and asked him to leave. He still needed to be there for one more night. So what does he do? He goes to the police station and asks the cops to put him in a cell for the night. They're like, you're fucking crazy. He told them he had nowhere else to go and told them why he was there. The cops decided that since they thought it was stupid that people couldn't stay in Subic Bay because of the Americans, he could sleep on the bench in the lobby. Next day, he arrives to the place where they take applications at an hour he thinks is early. Only the line is already long, like Matterhorn-at-Disneyland-in-the-summer long. He waits in line all day. At some point the line stops moving. He decides to risk his place in line and goes to the front to figure out what is going on. Turns out the little booth where they take apps is CLOSED for the day, which means he would have to come back next month. Word travels down the line and people start leaving. But my dad says, Fuck that, pulls out his knife and jimmies the window on the booth open and drops his application right on the top of the pile in the tray in the tiny little office. A few other people see what he's doing and throw theirs in too before a guard notices and chases everyone away. And that hustler perseverance, folks, in addition to certain procreative efforts between my parents, is why I'm sitting here in the Oakland, CA, EEUU right now...

2. Create communication buffers (if you are still reading, thanks. I know I don't write "effective" blog posts. Mercury... wordy... talk too much...).

When you are having a difficult conversation, literally count to 10 or even walk away until you can cool down. Once again, something we should practice on the daily.

Re-read that important email or text you are about to send. Then wait anywhere from 5 minutes to a day before you send it depending on how big of an impact it will have on your life or someone else's life. Read it again after the break and see if you think your response is the one that will serve all parties best.

Ask trusted confidantes what they think of your possible response to a situation before you make it.

3. Know when to just stop. Do you really need to be doing this right now? Seriously, can it wait 11 days? This may seem to be in opposition to #1, but there are times when, if you really take the time to analyze the steps you are trying to take, the thing you are trying to start up, you will find that maybe you could give yourself a little more time before you take the steps for execution. Think of the time as an opportunity to really critique the plan you have laid out and find new ways to execute it, uncover obstacles you hadn't taken into account, and seek advice and feedback.

4. If all else fails, Mercury is a God. Court him accordingly. He accepts offerings and blood sacrifice. Seriously.

Crush

2013-03-05T00:46:00.002-08:00

I thought of you today and the day before. Told your story to a lover as if I'd already healed from your departure.

You must be close; I hear your breath over my shoulder.

I never knew how to mourn you, so I cried in secret or pretended my tears were for something else.

(They call them crushes because they hurt so, the body and heart yearning for nearness.)

When your heart stopped your were among close strangers on a far-from-home island, our connection born of long days of work and study.

Everyone was afraid to enter the room where you had begun to die, as if you were already haunting us. I was the only one who agreed to pack your things for your family.

Even in death I craved a closeness I knew would never exist.

I found your wedding rings on the dresser and packed them first, noting where they were so I could tell your husband. I gathered your toiletries from the bathroom, your books, your laptop, your journal. I folded your clothes and tucked the rest of your detritus among them.

After I zipped closed your suitcases I found a hair tie in your bed, strands of hair still coiled around it.

I couldn't resist having something of you, so I wore it on my wrist for the rest of the time we remained in the city where you died.

I wore it as I cried on the plane back home and to the mortuary where your body lay.

I wore it to the funeral service where your loved ones spoke of you dearly.

When I came to your casket I tucked the hair tie beneath the rose petals that adorned your chest, afraid to carry your essence into the rest of my life.

I had no words, still have no words for how I loved you, unrequited and silent to the grave.