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 …