My blindness, my body

arnoldo garcía

My blindness
Has not
Slowed me down.

I take my time
Looking at you
Memorizing the times I made you laugh
To blur over the other times I made you cry
The curvatures
Of your face
Wrinkles
That are rivulets of life

I am a master at science fiction
I can portray myself
As defying time and space
Gravity has no pull
I am a natural human combustion
From the loins of a woman called
Guadalupe.

I am going deaf
Now only a B natural note
Whirs in my neurons
Bouncing around
An insatiable insect
The hum of electricity in my body
A note in the unending chain of the music of DNA

My blindness
Has not blinded me
to your termporal beauty
My deafness roars
With symphonies and corridos
My body
A grand canyon
A tempest
A purépecha temple
Overgrown with rainforest and serpent clouds
And other ancestral lusts

I have no other place to struggle
Than from this homeland this mother earth body of mine
You don’t lose your senses
For each one that fails
A new one is born in resistance in struggle
I have a body surrounding me
For each one of my senses
A hearing body
A feeling body
A smelling body
A touching body
A seeing body
A body of ears
A body of skin, pores, molecules that sponge up your skin
A body of noses for your sweet
human smell,
work sweat,
laughter sweat,
sex sweat,
the smell of freshly slightly tinged
burnt tortillas
Chiles verdes, tomates,
your freshly bathed body,
your shadow a cool face for the farmworker in me
A body
made of hands
that trace worlds and other senses
over your body
over the dust
through the wind,
that  cover my eyes from the sunlight,
that cover my mouth when I gasp at you
under my hands
a body of sign languages and gang signals for peace
A body of irises
Light contact
stare-downs asking, begging for tenderness,
broken windows sleepless deprivation, dream worlding
A body of sounds
a body of sails and propellers
to catch the wind
transform sound into energy
sound into bodies tightly wrapped around a song
bodies made of tongues
that speak in my body to yours
asking for nothing in return for everything
A body made of
creaking beds,
rusty vowels,
defiant skeletons,
a vibration
a vibe
a vibratone
a viper of thunder
I surround myself
with you and my other bodies,
which in turn multiply into five bodies each
and those into five bodies each
An infinite
Human
sense
that doesn’t make a sound
unless a sound wants to mate
and my body is blindness deafness
where everything everyone everywhere
resides…