poetry

Full Moon

It’s been a long time since I’ve shared any work from the Acentos workshops on Sunday. I didn’t share this at the workshop because I got shy. Yes, I have that emotion in my arsenal. Follow:

My first kiss was the sweetest “Shut the F*k Up” I’d ever gotten from the first of many curvy, sassy, infuriating, mostly-older women I’d ever met liplocked with this brotha with no way of experiencing anything like this until he traveled physically and mentally to places he never thought possible like his mother’s place of ancestry at a time when night meant white rice, prayer, a faint scent of Johnny Walker, and a new moon chillin’ with Antony Santos and a gang of friends pushing him too far to a lady six years his senior chasing him until he submitted to her will 10 years after his first Christmas where he got his first gift which made him want that gift over and over like a new moon rising right over his house …

Jose, who was reminded tonight that he was a poet, too …

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“Make You Whole” by Jose Vilson © 2009

She gives him a look of absent fatalism
Welds streams of release through her face’s fine crevices
Blood surfaces just below her epidermis
Flushing away the transparencies of her tears and her emotions
She’s flawless,
Nicks and bruises all along her curvatures
Willing to walk into whirlwinds
Chairs, desks, knives, shovels, and scales abound
Cumulus clouds cross paths with the sun
Like sweaty hands trying to read each others’ comfort level
Feeling the grooves left by age, DNA, and the unhanded gifts
They still reach out to
As they walk past obstacles which, alone, you dare not tread
Agita brews anger in a cold serving of reality
Unbeknown to them mutually
Rewrites scripts, flips presents to rifts
Makes heart-shaped holes, revealing only flesh and bone
Misplaced cordate organs,
Somewhere hidden under our guts
Out of position, they’re clinging to their voiceboxes
Contort our uncomfortable faces
Screams out to their memories,
Where this pain only distorts its echoes
All the while, two lovers suffer insufferably
Others glaze on the new dense air around them
One closes his eyes, takes a deep breath
Unhinges the entanglements in his stomach
And says simply, “I love you.”
She tightens her lip,
Swings her neck, fighting through a non-existent wind current
Looks deeply into his piercing eyes
With the look of a million women
Who symbolized perfection at any innumerable moments for a million more men
Repeats her faults in order
Frustrations in reverse
She gives a look of absent fatalism
She pauses.
Content with the reply, she repeats his vow of love
She’s content with him, connected with his soul
“Just forget your shortcomings, baby. You make me whole …”

Jose, who came from the heart …

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Wine and Bread

Alas, the year is finally over for me. Today was my first official day off from school, and my feet, more than any other part of my body, have been thanking me for giving them some much needed rest. There are wars going on all across the world, dictatorships and coups reigning, unemployment reaching scary levels, global warming bringing its subtle tap on our shoulders to a pounding, and the dollar slowly becoming absolved as a world currency … and I couldn’t care less because school’s over.

My summer plans include revamping my ever-changing website (and I think the next update is going to be the proverbial lightning in a bottle), working with one of my favorite poets of all time, losing a little weight, and hitting up Orlando, Jamaica (not Queens), and Miami / Ft. Lauderdale to see the family. I’ll also have about 9 days of work in there where I’ll be working exclusively to help my school excel in the best ways possible.

In other words, just because I’m not working, it doesn’t mean I’m not working. Right?

Here’s a little tidbit for my poets. Tell me what you think. It was inspired by the aforementioned favorite poet at one of her workshops. She asked us to pick the first word that popped into our heads and get the definition from an etymology dictionary, and use it to write a piece. You know I’m always up for a challenge. Here’s the homework, Ms. Betts.

“Sacrosanct”

Protected by religious sanction
Like my first name akin to a slave turned king
Seeking vengeance in reign not death
Or a father of this holy father once removed
From a miracle, a miracle, my Mom’s first name
Like getting baptized, teaching my elders,
Breaking bread, sipping wine, and confirming my own name
In the Holy Spirit, I believe
Like conversations with extraterrestrials and their conduits,
Entrusting that they’ll physically protect your encasing
When your soul’s half risen
Like a kidnapping for more than decade
Where hell existed right on Earth
While outside observers can’t recognize the agony
Like confusing the Father with a father and the fathers
Angels & demons intermingle so fluidly
Like justifying the nuances of life with the handwritten,
Specifically tailored
Filtered
Man-ifested laws and ideals of a being we’ve interpreted as male
Who can intercept the odds of human events by using the natural or coincidental
Like our metaphors for our first kiss,
Sexual moment,
Minutes of ecstasy and ebullience,
Our triumphs, achievements, & accolades as sacrificial ritual
Before the next person envies us
And in evolutionary fashion, kills us
Survival of the fittest
Like marriage between man and woman and other definitions
Just won’t fit millennium-old standards;
Exponents of polyamory maybe
Like near-death experiences with familiar  faces either screaming
Or singing
Or signaling you home
Like providing for your whole family and obeying your faith
By stripping you of everything but your resolve
Like an extended metaphor for the stories
I was asked to rejoice over while I
Relearned and reborrowed the word ’sacrosanct’
Like what I plan to name my first child
Upon birthing him, he too will learn this word
At the moment of his first spanking
Like that first cry, sweet and shrill …

Jose, who, believe it or not, went to church yesterday …

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Coffee Cup

Another poem inspired by that crazy Acentos workshop last Sunday I keep talking about. Comment as you please.

I was never an empty cup.
I was never a lifelong experience before.
I was never a sniffle, a sneeze, or a trifle.
I was never a drip, a snip, or a clip.
I was never a tumbleweed
Bouncing through indicating dearth of life.
I was never a fine.
I was never a small claim.
Though I’ve definitely been a warning.
I was never a small shoelace
I was never a thread
I was never a strap
I was never a minute hand
My experiences move at hours at a time.
I was never a blink
I was never a simple character.
I was never a small dosage.
I was never a simple sheet of looseleaf
Gliding in the wind wrought with nonsensical words and illustrations
I was never the simple piece of the puzzle
I was never a simple strand of hair
I was never the rubble, the scraps, the leftovers frozen
Readily reheated for easy consumption
I was never stardust
I was never just one digit
I was never just one stroke
I was never worth just one touch
I was never satisfied with just one kiss
I was never an easily disassembled package
I was never a note
I was never an alien
(Just kidding, I was never above a little white lie)
I was never an empty cup
Even as you drink, the cup fills until my handle whittles;
Its remnants aside the coffee grinds …

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