[Poema 21] The rain & the backpack

My hands have become the rain.
My lungs, the roots of the oldest birth
My belly-button, a volcano
My words, serpent-clouds.
My lips, the oldest, the place of the first and last, kiss of humanity 
I rain tenderness over your body
I breath the night into my womb
gestating a new day a new life a new land
I spew prayers and cries to decimate the solitude
of waiting for you.
I have engraved your voice on my skin
I have tattooed your sorrow in the hum of my sixth sense
Your cancer pounds on the doors
The rain bounces off the pavement
Everywhere we are alone
until you lift your face into the rain
The dark clouds are full of light
The clothes that have been left in the dryer,
unfolded, wrinkling
are signs
of a busy family
of a working class woman
of a farm-worker grandmother
undermined by pesticides and god
savior of our sanity, our laughter, our souls

*

The Backpack

White men get out of my way.
They see a brown man with a backpack
My backpack is on my skin and in my curly hair
My backpack makes their hearts pound nervously
what does he have in the backpack
will he hurt us
will his (my) body explode
into an unidentifiable carcass with inhuman dna?
The white guy decides to talk to me
looks at my hand clutching the strap over my left shoulder
as he makes small talk about the security line.
what line is shorter, faster?
He eyes my tattooed hands
Forces a smile and looks at my backpack again.
He does not like me
I am right behind him.
Little does he realize
that my backpack is filled with exquisite arms,
weapons,
dense neutron word bombs called
books
ink
notebooks
a laptop filled with notes, poems, photographs
dozens of pens and two or three fountain pens
cellphone, i-pod with thousands of songs from jazz, son jarocho, blues, non-linear weird space noise,
and cords for these gadgets erroneously called wireless.
I am dangerous:
Mahmoud Darwish is in my backpack, Palestinian terror lyricist
So is Mayakovsky, a suicide poet
So is a junior high school English teacher
author of an Indigenist Xicano terrorist novel called, Atomik Aztex
Shuntaro Tanikawa, who taught Coca Cola a lesson
The entire street of Al-Mutanabbi
A new edition of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat"
The crazed workerist Franco "Bifo" Berardi, preaching uprisings in poetry and finances
AT the bottom of them all,
Vasily Grossman, soviet, russian, jewish writer who witnessed it all, wrote down the blood of world war II.
Yes
my backpack
is a bomb
the neutron bomb of backpacks
filled with liberating ideas, justice warriors, freedom theories
and martyrs who are reborn every time you open their lives
So yes beware the brown man with my backpack
I might just take your life and give you a new one.