Life as I know it.

Growing up is a bitch. They should have warned us about this in school. It would have been a hell of a lot more useful than geometry, for instance. Enid Blyton should have been slipping us subliminal messages in between crumpets and scones:  get your kicks while you can. It just seems like life has become one major decision after another, and lot of wasted time in between. It seems like every decision I make involving my future is bound to disappoint someone, mostly myself. Why do we have to make it so damn hard for ourselves to be happy?

After a hiatus of two months, I am back on the job hunt, trying to in vain to find something that won't require me selling my soul. Working in the retail/corporate field for a few weeks now has given me a taste of what it feels like to be a part of the work force drones. I wake up everyday and walk to work. The air is fabulously crisp, the sky is a beautiful blue, birds are chirping, squirrels are running underfoot, and for ten fantastic minutes, twelve if I walk slowly, I get to enjoy the great outdoors. And then I enter my office and don't see the light of day til 4.30, during which time a hurricane could have passed overheard, earthquakes could have torn apart small countries and major war could have been declared and I would have been blissfully ignorant. Then I walk back home, uphill this time, so less enjoyable, and dine and snooze til I get to do it all over again the next day. And I think to myself, is this what the next 30 years will be like? The best hours of the day, the best years of my life, spent indoors and out of sight?

I think the people I admire and envy the most are the people with a ceaseless, unending passion for life. Those who know exactly what they want to do and are out doing it. Those who are not driven by money or fame, but by heart. I would like to be a photographer standing in the shadows of the pyramids of Egypt, or diving with great white sharks or holed up in a loft in SoHo writing the novel that you will one day read. I want to be that artist in the quaint cottage in Spain working on her masterpiece, or the chef that makes food that dances on your tongue. But most of all, I want to live. Not just as a name on an employee masterlist, referred to by a number. No, I want to be the person that wakes up everyday with fire running through their veins. I want to be fierce and unstoppable and everything I am afraid I will not be.

I met a man once, in Hawaii. An old man, but there was nothing frail about him. He was a seaman, a diver, a revolutionary, power and energy emanating from his every pore. He was involved in the movement for sovereignty for Hawaii, to get back their land and their rights. He lived in a small house on an outcrop of rock that rose straight out of the ocean. His house was sparse at best; the basic table, chairs and bed, small bathroom with a sink and mirror, flowered curtains fluttering in the breeze. Downstairs a stove, pots and pans and a porch with a hammock. And a view. And what a view it was. He would wake to the sunrise, the sky shot golden and blazing white, and dolphins, schools of dolphins pirouetting through the air. You could step out his front door, walk two steps and dive ten feet down into the ocean. You could put on your snorkeling gear and  see a hundred different kinds of fish, right below his doorstep. I know, because I did it. And in the evening the sky would turn a fiery red, and the boats would come in, and the campfires would light up along the beach. And at night, lying in that hammock, you could reach up and touch the Millky Way. What a fabulous life. He wasn't rich, he wasn't good looking, he wasn't even famous. And yet, he had the world at his fingertips.

When I'm sad or lonely or frustrated with the world, I think about him, and it makes me happy that there are people out there in the world who are still alive.

done deed.

At long last
the day I've been waiting for
dreading
anticipating
for nine months now
it is here, and it is done.

No, I did not have a baby.

I thought I would be excited
ecstatic
relieved.
Instead I woke up
and went to work.

Now I'm faced with
a whole set of
new decisions
new paths to take
new bridges to cross.
Dramatic much?

I'm feeling supremely..
meh.
I'm going to bed.
I have work tomorrow.

For 9/11

 

there have been no words.

no poetry in the ashes south of canal

no prose in trucks driving debris and dna.

evident out my window in abstract reality.

sky where once was steel.

smoke where once was flesh.

please god, let it be a mistake,

the pilot’s heart, the plane’s engine.

god, please, don’t let it be anyone

who looks like my brothers.

i do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill.

i have never been so hungry that i willed hunger

never been so angry as to want a gun over a pen.

not really.

even as a woman, a palestinian.

never this broken.

ricardo on the radio said in his accent thick as yuca,
“i will feel so much better when the first bombs drop over there.

a woman crying in a car parked and stranded in hurt.

i offered comfort, a hand she did not see before she said,

“we”re gonna burn them so bad.”

my hand went to my head, and my head to the

dead iraqi children, the dead in nicaragua. in rwanda

who vie with fake sport wrestling for america’s attention.

people saying this was bound to happen, lets not forget u.s. transgressions,

hold up, i live here, these are my friends and fam,

me in those buildings, and we're not bad people,

do not support america’s bullying.

can i just have  half a second to feel bad?

thank you to the woman who saw me brinking cool and blinking tears,

opened her arms before she asked “do you want a hug?”

big white woman, and her embrace only people with flesh can offer.

“my brother’s in the navy,” i said. “and we're arabs”.

"wow, you got double trouble.” word.

one more person ask me if i knew the hijackers.

one more motherfucker ask me what navy my brother is in.

one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed.

assume they know me, or that i represent a people.

or that a people represent an evil. or that evil is as simple as a

flag and words on a page.

we did not vilify white men when mcveigh bombed oklahoma.

give out his family’s address or church or blame the bible or pat fucking robertson.

networks air footage of palestinians dancing in the street

no apology that hungry children are bribed with

sweets that turn their teeth brown.

correspondents edit images.

archives facilitate lazy journalism.

and when we talk about holy books, hooded men and death, why never mention the kkk?

if there are any people on earth who understand how new york is

feeling right now, they are in the west bank and the gaza strip.

bush has waged war on a man once openly funded by the cia.

I’ve read too many books to believe what I’m told.

i don’t give a fuck about bin laden.

his vision of the world don’t represent me or those i love

but I’ve signed petitions for years to out the u.s. sponsored taliban. 

shit is complicated, and I don’t know what to think.

but i know who will pay.

women, mostly colored and poor,

will have to bury children, support themselves through grief.

in america, it will be those amongst us who refuse blanket attacks on the shivering,
who work toward social justice and opposing hateful policies.

“either you are with us, or with the terrorists”

 meaning keep your people under control and resistance censored.

meaning we got the loot and the nukes.

never felt less american and more brooklyn than these days.

these stars and stripes represent the dead as citizens first,

not family, not lovers.

my skin is real thin, my eyes are darker.

the future holds little light.

my baby brother is a man now, on alert, praying five times a

day the orders he will take are righteous

and not weigh his soul down from the afterlife.

both my brothers - my heart stops- 

not a beat disturbs my fear. 

muslim, gentle men. born in brooklyn

and their faces are of the arab man, 

all eyelashes and nose and beautiful color and stubborn hair.

what will their lives be like now?

over there is over here.

across the river, burning rubber and limbs

rescuers traumatized.

the skyline brought back to human size.

no longer taunting gods

i cried when i saw those buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart. 

i have never owned pain that needs to spread like that.

there is no poetry in this. 

causes and effects, symbols and ideologies. 

mad conspiracy here, information we will never know. 

there is death here, and promises of more.

there is life here. anyone hearing this is breathing, maybe hurting,

but breathing for sure.

if there is any light to come, it will

shine from the eyes of those who look 

for peace and justice after the rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen.

affirm life.

affirm life.

we got to carry each other now.

you are either with life, or against it.

affirm life.

by Suheir Hammad

there's something in the air tonight
a hushed silence
as though the world is waiting

there are no fireflies flitting in a coy dance of light
no whispering in the leaves
an errant cricket chirps
and is quickly hushed by an unseen hand

the world waits
and with the taste of wine bitter on my tongue
my eyes searching the sky for the moon, our moon
I too, wait.

write

Writing, for me, has always been a sort of release. I experimented with it when I was small, writing all my teenage woes in a diary soon to be found by my mother and brother and broadcast to the entire family. So I stopped that. And then I began blogging, and with it I found that in fact I do love to write, and it has begun to be not only important, but even essential to put down a few words now and then on what's going through my head. I find that I write more when I am sad, and less when I am happy. In fact, sometimes I yearn to put down something in writing but just can't formulate the rhythm and flow in my head to let it out, and I think darn, guess I'm too happy.

A while ago I began experimenting with short fiction, that which I tentatively dubbed 'prose'. My aim was to create an image in my head and build a story around it, adding on details and descriptions to make my reader see what I saw. The things I wrote about were never about me; they always stemmed from a word that had been lodged in my head, a feeling, a song, something I saw on the street, something that came to me in a dream. I picture it to be like a single, silvery thread clinging to a wand tip as it was laid in a pensieve, where the thread would be the emotion I used to build my story.

A little later I turned to poetry. I'm hesitant to call what I write poetry or use the term poet on myself, but I can't think another term. We grew up reading the kind of poetry that rhymed, so poets like EE Cummings, and later on Mayda del Valle, Suheir Hammad, Staceyann Chin were a revelation to me. Listening to spoken word poetry always inspires me to write. The intensity, the flow, the rhythm, the content always feeds into me and sets off little sparks in my head. I often lament that I don't have a cause to write for; no undying passion or fierce devotion to pour into poems. My poems always center around love or sadness because those are emotions I feel most often. I wish I had the talent and the courage to speak my poems, to be heard the way they are meant to be heard, because they are written to a particular rhythm in my head without which they probably wouldn't make sense. Lately I've turned a lot to poetry, because in the absence of pictures in my heard, I find a certain peace in putting words together in an erratic form, kind of like a song, or a dance of words. Again, it is the imagery that drives me, but in poem form the challenge is different. It is to paint the picture with no frills, no descriptions, in as few words as possible..

Now I'm rambling. I'm not sure why I even started writing this. Maybe to explain to myself, and to the one person it counts that my words are just stories. They are not based in reality, not about someone. I am a private person who doesn't share that easily, even here, on a private blog. You can't read my life, my thoughts like a book based on what I write. I've always loved stories and I want to tell them, in a way that makes my reader see what I'm seeing, so that they too may paint that picture in their heads. But it's not about me. Never about me.