i am a terrible poet.
the words i tied together in attempt
to annunciate 
the way your kisses felt
along the soft of my 
cheeks were
mediocre and just barely enough.

just barely.

there weren't enough ways that i could describe
the mouthful 
of stars that spilled at the seams of my

lips as you gently traced them with warm finger tips.

mm, your finger tips.

your finger tips felt like a personal extension from god himself as

they dusted the empty jars i left untouched

in the forgotten spaces of me.

you held them tightly and filled them to the top

with a breathful of morning secrets

and hidden places to meet.

i found you.

i found you and allowed the words to slip

through my small hands

as you kissed my palms gently and sweetly

and folded them into your own to keep for just a little bit.
(
i could stay here)
i could lay underneath your tired smiles

and messy hair

until stars realigned themselves and directed

me to you all over again.
(
i could stay here)

i could tangle in-between your pale sheets
and make up all the words that

effortlessly translate the way i melted and simmered

at the sheer thought of waking up and knowing you again.

i could illustrate all of the galaxies you whispered

onto the trail of my back with

colors and warmth i never knew

and turn them into poorly strung together,

black and white strings of thought.

you were my favorite secret

and the cause of all of my writer’s block.

(i could stay here)


i’ve lived in florida my entire life

and have spent more days than i can count

under the sun and in the wake of rays that always burned,

but i’ve never felt more warmth than lying underneath

your expired thoughts and eclipsing eyes

as the moon seeped through your broken window blinds.

i forgot what it was like to breathe

until you took my face
sweetly and sincerely
and kissed me.
the paragraphs and ellipses that perforated my parenthetical
sighs of relief
stained the corners of my mouth
and lingered
long enough for me to remember
the after taste of your recycled sunshine
as you left me.

i am a terrible poet,
but a better kept secret it seems.

May my ignorance blind me.

For I'm a product of the 90's,
Instead of being like Jesus,  
we all wanted to be like Mike.
Is that facetious?
Or sound just about right?

Right...? No Left,
Child Act Behind...
they say my dyslexia forever disrupts mind...
my...mind...
He yells louder,
"Why am I wasting my time
with you Brock?
You don't want to learn,
God ******!
Quit staring at the clock!
Now go on read the sentence
and annunciate on that last word,
don't overestimate the time,
It is not going to move any faster..."
There I sat boiling, as he wagged his finger in my face as he stood behind,
tempting me to call upon my intrepid Power Ranger besieged mind.
I would cut his head off with a swoosh of my sword,
sparks go flying and down goes Zedd-Lord.  
"God ******, Brock it's Lord-Zedd!" , I shouted in my own head.

So, in my imagination;
I still cannot properly read.
Where will this get me?
No where fast...
I work continually, properly, systematically, honestly, legitimately, every way I can to learn every word I  want to know.
That's where I want to Go.

Like I said, I'm a product of the 90's.
A whole generation discovered off the product of:
I find me.
Instead of having the powers given to us, we worked for them.

And that is the difference between Jesus and Jordan.
And that is the difference between Jesus and Jordan.
And that is the difference between Jesus and Jordan.

May my knowledge open eyes.

I can write about all the ways we miscommunicate
Words and phrases and lack of response
Blank faced with no sense of emotion or displays of affection
Unsure of whatever spectrum we're on
But if we even are on the same one, we're on opposite sides
It's funny how I can bleed out through pen ink but I can't ever seem to annunciate
My words won't translate into how I feel to anyones face and yours is no exception in this case
Barriers I feel terrified to get through
The break downs are rough and like milk you had in the fridge for months
You forgot it was there but when you find it it's spoiled

I sat there in his office, for our first formal meeting and
I thought: what a strange little man
and I thought: thoughts are private, he can't know
but I've no poker face, so as I watched him look at me silently
I was eyeing him like a stained onion under a microscope
Look at the cell wall, the keys dangling from the faded Dockers from 1982
the pale hands with the small sausage fingers
everyone talked about his hands and those small fingers
that would gesticulate and pontificate and annunciate his power over us
He walked from his desk to the table, and it seemed like it took ten steps
and he became smaller with every stride, in the faded wrinkled shirt, made of flannel
like a used bed sheet
there is the nucleus, the papers in his hand I thought and his faded green eyes darted
over at me, and he knew, he could feel it, he knew I thought he was a dork
At last he settled down at the table and I joined him and the sausage fingers
of power shuffled through my evaluations, which were good
before he had that grudge, nursed over the summer
before he let it sink in that he was never good enough in my eyes
that he was always dissapointing me
I would walk to him, like trying to buy good organic food at a seven eleven
and wondering why every time, it wasn't there
He knew he couldn't do anything right in my eyes
He wasn't up to my challenge
I didn't know that he knew

the brilliance of the darkness
served only to annunciate
the loudness of the passing silence

While the pervasiveness of the defeated idea
continues to occur in self-[a.s.s].embly lines
The nano utilizes a scope of micro to flesh out the macro

Simultaneous non-being
duly correlates to the emptiness of the tao’s ***-shaped,quantum hat
Possibility is endless, until you enlist knowledge as your retainer
The origin of all particular things is lost
through the knower being zenly slapped,

I just would have loved to help schroedinger's cat
pur.........
what a *****, he wouldn’t even open the box to check her.

Dear ∞ this is my letter to you while I let her be bound in quite comfortably in lazer-light leather.

Oh words that have been left unspoken,
Why must you carry so much weight?
Why can't you string yourselves together
And annunciate or communicate?

The words held in check I do not follow
Wondering about throughout my mind.
But now and again reemerging to remind
Myself what not to say.

Speaking my mind is not an option
The words would be uncontrolled
And my tongue would begin to fold
At the bitter taste of the words that should be left untold.

I think about you only when I’m alone
Distraction is great when you’re inlove with someone who is incapable of compassion
I have the taste of your skin memorized on the tip of my tongue
Every time I annunciate I feel your hand wrapped around my throat then your lips whispering in my ear

hush

I always stopped talking when you told me too but that’s exactly what you hated about me
I’m sorry that the hem on my sleeve has unraveled and my heart is on the floor but we cannot all be broken the same way
The truth is I only need you when I haven’t seen you in months
I only cry for you when I think about you unbuttoning my jeans
The swift movement down my thighs taking a white sock off with them at the same time
I know the fragile curves of my body are imprinted in your unconscious and when you touch other girls your hands smell like my perfume.
We only want each other when we can’t have each other and that’s why I’ll spend the rest of my life with other men.

How do I make you understand.
The feelings that I struggle,
These battles, I hesitate.
My words, I don’t annunciate.
You feel my push and pull
And yet I feeling nothing at all.
Unfortunately....
To lie,
But for what reason do I have to cry.
I slam a door
The hell was that for.
One day I’m shy
Tomorrow I’m saying goodbye
Then I beg for your caress
While I scream that I imagine my carcass.
How do I make you understand
That this is how I hesitate
And forever may not be our fate
Because I laugh, then cry
And who wants a mutter nearby
Sometimes I’m sweet like blue sky
But I swear the devil sweats beneath these eye

I am 15 years old and when my home is too full of rage for me to fit, I squeeze out of the cracked walls so I can meet up with my Black boyfriend in a park across my neighborhood.

This one time in the spring rain he told me he loved me and it felt like magic was real.

I step into a well maintained 1997 conversation van

Watch the conqueror dance across my Brown father’s lips
He turns the key in the ignition and looks at me with the kind of fear I don’t understand
His voice drips inside of my skull like honey or venom

“The world is harder when you’re with them”

I sit in silence because I know that wasn’t a question
and we are late for my dentist appointment anyway

So, I cling to the arm of every Brown lover.

When I’m alone I escape
Google: what is racism
Google: how to not be racist
Google: can Mexicans be racist?

.

I am 8 years old sitting upright in my bed
I pray to a White looking God that he will fix me.

I bargain with him for blue eyes that sit flush against my face
Hair that looks like the girls on TV
Just cut this big, ugly nose off of me, I don’t even need one  

I will do anything
I just want to be normal.

At school, my friend Kaylee tells me that I can’t come to her birthday party because her mom says mutts
aren’t allowed in her house.

A week later there is a new girl in school who speaks Spanish

The teacher sits her next to me. I say hello and apologize with my smile for not knowing the right way to say her name

I understand we are not the same.

.

I am 22 years old and somewhat college educated.
I refuse to apply for any scholarship labeled “Latino” because they aren’t for me.

¡And on my life!
I’m not gong to be just another White girl who claims to be 1/16th Cherokee.

My social justice warrior friends and I all discuss our privileges and oppressions
We map them out in increasingly complex narratives
Lay them on the table like constellations

I learn about White guilt, White fragility

When my Brown father asks what I’m studying, he tries not to scoff.
He owns toilet paper with Barack Obama’s face on it.
He’s a Virgo.

In the summer, I transcend.
My skin never burns like my friends’
Instead, it glistens like predators’ eyes.

“Wow, you actually look Mexican! I hardly recognize this picture of you”

.

I am sitting at the kiosk in the mall where I work.

The wealthy White woman comes up to me and coos over my long dark hair
She grabs a handful for herself 
Marvels, asks where I am really from.

So long as I annunciate clearly, correctly
Answer politely when they ask me
“What are you?”

So long as I remove all of that unsightly black hair that White women never have sprouting from their *******.

No one will ever see the teeth shaped scars on my tongue
I tell myself I am “protector”

.

I am 27 years old and living in the Whitest city in the universe.



My coworkers invite me to join the POC affinity group
POC means Person of Color
My POC-ness fits me like an expensive gift two sizes too large



Suddenly, I am alone on an island built of the correct pronunciation of Chorizo
But I’m vegan now so I buy the expensive soy kind from Trader Joe’s

.

On a dating app,
A Black man from somewhere else breaks the ice
“FINALLY! It’s so lovely to meet you. Really, it is just such a lovely thing to know you. Wow. Hello. I can never find POC around here!”

I explain to him I am an imposter.

He is a very sweet man, touches my cheek
“We are people of the sun, and we are beautiful”

I only remember this moment when I am too high.
Is this feeling guilt, or fragility?

.

After an exhausting holiday season,
I sit in front of my expensive laptop reading an email,
But in my mind I am in the heart of downtown LA in 1989


He must have run from the top of the tower of LA fitness on his last day of
Working for The Man in an impressive office
Making good money
Having something to show for himself

A flurry of gray suits and flying papers
Anything for a chance to meet The Greatest

When Muhammad Ali met my Brown father
And saw the photograph freshly removed from it’s frame
Of a young Black man sitting upon a jewel encrusted throne
Eyes fixed to the future somewhere

When he tells the story, he says that Ali smiled
Exhaled a chuckle  
“Well, I’ll be dammed. Is that me?”

My Brown father keeps this treasure away somewhere safe
So he can look upon it
While he sits at home in his White neighborhood
With White carpet
That he will always walk on with his shoes.
.
I like to think he feels powerful, my Brown father,
When he sees a king that reminds him of himself.
Someone who learned how to channel all of his rage
And never lose his affinity for butterflies

The email reads:

Howdy,
I don’t remember if I have sent this to you. Regardless, you should save this interview. I know that Ali was the "Greatest", even though I didn't like everything he did or said.  Much like John Lennon. Told it like it is, both of them! These two are iconic. I am extremely happy to have had these two in my life. I hope you enjoy

Peace, Love,
Dad

Attached, he includes a video of a television interview recorded in the year 1971.

“Why is everything White?”

“Do we go to heaven, too?”

.
I’m walking through my grandmother’s neighborhood deep in East LA.
A concrete safari
Where safety looks like pointy steel bars across every window.

This is the street my Brown father was caught playing with cherry bombs
And then beaten.

The rose bushes in the back yard have lived here for decades.
If they could eat, they would have been fed handmade tortillas up until the day they started to sell the pre-made ones in the store.

Grandpa, why do we call her Grandma Melon?
Because when I ask to kiss her, she says ‘Oh, honey do!’
It’s quite the crowd pleaser, everyone laughs because we came here to get along

But I like her real name so in my mind I call her Magdalena.

In this neighborhood, Tia Rita, Tia Lola, and Grandma like to go to bingo together
And get their hair done
And watch old westerns where the White man always saves the girl in the end.

Later we will go to Omana’s in Pomona where my cousin Jason swears that one day he found a human knuckle in his carnitas.

Half of us believe him, but we order another round anyways because we know it’s the best taqueria this side of the 10.

Just up the road is a building where young Brown men go to enlist
So they might escape neighborhoods with so many cracked walls.

My Brown father was sent to Texas
Looked White men straight in their red, swollen faces
“You ain’t White, you ain’t right boy”
But that was a long time ago.

After lunch, he reminds me why he left this place
“The traffic is *******, the noise”
Besides, nothing quells violence inside of us quite like the trees and rivers back home.


But, Dad, I am White, right?

.

When I see my White mother my heart swells with love.

Who taught her to laugh like that?
With all of her teeth and joy

She wishes she knew how to give me a quinceanera
or what to do with my unruly hair.

Neither of us know, really, so every Christmas she buys me something to burn my hair into submission.

I stopped using them a few years ago, now
But they have a forever home in the back of my linen closet
Just in case

When my Brown father tells me he sees a goodness in her
I taste each homemade birthday cake
And agree

In my Brown father’s mind he is “protector”
After all, what more could he have given me than an easier life?

.

It’s Sunday morning in the year 2002.
Dad made us eggs and hot dogs and perfect toast

Our house is always filled with music

When no-one is around to see
He will sit in his chair
Listen to John Lennon

He will tell me that no man is perfect
But that all you need is love

It always makes me laugh

I see my father in everyone.