A Letter to My Son

son, the lines in your palms
have gotten you this far
and the map in your heart
will take you farther

be safe on your journeys to a new land
where you can....

BE

you
no impositions of definitions
except the ones you choose. you said,

"ma, life is all around you"
and i didn't believe it because for so long
I lived amongst the white walls
white white white walls
white faces that told me:
depend on masks, hair, and bras to up lift
what ever I wasn't
and hide whatever I was

how can i see life, if someone is looking at me to look at myself?
i had no agency, silenced
by their objects yet wearing it
to make myself MORE
of an object
like collecting baseball cards for a collection
i sat on their shelves, in their possessions

until i met you, my son
whose beauty reflects off of me
when i see
how grown you get
just from having colors
of imagination paint depth

and finally from your cries,
i could breathe out
whatever i held in,
at birth

i heard life
and saw life
and kissed life
and made life

aren't you proud of your mother?
despite what they made up,
she made out what was natural to her.

so my sweet son,
you came from a line
of instinct and just follow
what is natural to you.

walking backwards

normally, i walk home from campus. I have a route: pass uci extension, pass student health center and the police department, through verano place, up through the arc fields, across the backetball courts and up all the stairs.

today i tried walking backwards from home to campus. and though i have this path going one direction, it is a totally different direction going backwards.

even though i'm walking in life on something familiar, i have to start all over, create a new path for myself. even if somewhere in the past i had already created a path.

it's strange the cycle of paths, like routes of water that somehow all connect--ocean rivers lakes ponds rain ponds lakes rivers and back into the ocean.......

it's been tough walking backwards, scary actually
yet i need to trust that the flow of my body will lead me on a path that will get me to where i need to be...

Warring Shame

I know shame like the shadow near my feet. It haunts, stretches, distorts, and sneaks up on me. There is a depthitude of worlds in which I traveled and never looked back. I ran out of there so fast.

Why would anyone want to be locked in the dark? Silent dark space. No sound, no wind, no smell, no touch, no taste, no you, nor me. We,

insignificant. It's terrifying running into the universe of fears. It's hard getting out. What kept me alive? This dream: white, green, orange, red, light, joy--colurs, flavors, life.

Life conquered the blackhole, where i'm from.

Where i'm from the black waters stole the souls of people. people who looked into their reflections and got dragged in by the Goddess of Death. They just couldn't let go. Yet how does one let go if all they know are their memories? What makes them who they are? Forget where you learned it from, it's in you now. The lines twists and bend into and outside of each other. Cross-eyed, and color blind, it's overwhelming, this war.

The noise of people trying to find each other is so loud that I go deaf. I hear a dead mute. Something in me died, tone deaf, losing my language, I can't hear differences. I just see people crying, running, screaming with mouths wide open, inaudible. No one can hear their voices trampled upon by men in green suits, black boots, jabbing with bayonets. Green, red, black, grey, dirt in the river. We all flowed into the river veins of mother and she cradled us until we found the open womb. Gapetto echoes in the night.

The sun doesn't set too far from the moon; we were born at the edge of a waterfall, rushing in like infection. White blood cells attacked, yelling Get out! You nasty germs pollute our blood with your genetic make-up. So we made ourselves up to disguise as them. But this shadow won't stop telling truth of who I am. I am the weathered skin of my feet. My soles cannot tell lies.

Abandonment

It hit me through my body,
violent vibrations with no ventilation.
It kept pulsing like fresh blood
from the wound, the womb.

My mother left me
because she had to work,
because of her own fears.
I knew she wanted to hold me,
and hear my cry for her breast,
for her.

My father left me too,
the day he hit me,
because he couldn't recognize
the girl he left behind.

So, he went to my little sister
(whom I am jealous of),
who resents me
for being the person
everyone loves but
can't have.

I abandoned them all
because it hurt too much to feel
their love, distant memory of a love,
lost in transit, in translation, in transition,
in America.

I abandoned the one I loved
before he could leave me. I,
a runaway, got good at hiding, yet
I kept searching for a distant
ideal, love in the form of a man.

Men, mirages, barrages of men,
who thought pulling a girl's hair
was fun, taking her freedom,
raping, molesting, violating, whistling, smothering,
silencing, playing, and lying to a girl was
okay, was everything a "man" does
in today's society.

But even after such violence,
I decided to comeback stronger
to face those men, however painful,
to face my family however painful,
to face my love, and
to face love in general...

(because I'm tired of running away
from being abandoned).