Five Questions

What were the best five lives,

the best five big bangs

the best five galaxies

the best five universes

the best five suns

the best five worlds

the best five centuries

the best five decades,

the best five years,

the best five months,

the best five days,

the best five hours,

the best five minutes,

the best five seconds

of a moment

of your family?

If you hear creaking mattresses

in the night of your home

is it ghosts or the orgasms

of unrequited lovers?

How many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandma’s, grandpa’s, aunts, uncles

have given their lives

so that you may have a shot at happiness?

What happens to you

when you see old photographs

of your ancestors,

do you fall in love with them

or do you wish they could tell you their stories?

Do you know

your grandmother’s favorite colors,

her birthdate,

the name of her first boyfriend,

if she loved someone other than your grandfather

and never left?

Will you be like her,

give birth to twelve children

with a man she may not love?

Will your love be that strong to survive anguish and wars?

My grandmother taught me

that my success was the offspring

of 1000 relatives and ancestors

who failed,

who struggled,

who suffered

and only knew happiness

as a legacy she, he, they gave to me.

I carry the anguish of thousands in my bones,

I get to smile, laugh, be nourished, be hopeful,

because they had no happiness,

only disease, deaths, harsh work

and tender lovemaking that birthed dead or dying children.

All my ancestors are light as an orgasm,

as deep as my belly laughs,

as clear as my tears.

When my grandmother tried to choke to death her husband

she was trying to kill the woman she never became.

She was a woman who loved women,

who loved me,

who loved plants and seeds,

who took care of all children

– because no child could be illegitimate –

who only believed in horizons

and where the waterfalls were her prayer beads.

She said:

You will become a revolutionary of love,

a revolutionary to destroy solitudes,

to resurrect all the old ones who didn’t make it

because they harvested someone else’s crops,

tilled their lands for other people,

who were killed by work and hate,

whose love was never honored,

whose lives mattered because they, she, created more life and lives.

My grandmother said she did not have children so that they would be slaves.

She had children so that they would have lives, not hers, their own.

And she would live in us, in me,

in whatever life we chose

and she would be free, lazy, drinking coffee,

have more free time to debate Protestants

and make her body the theology of the future.

My grandmother made love, made children, made a new god of her body…

[September 2013 | Oakland, Califaztlán, Ohlone Territory]

relationships | day 27 | poetry month |

I am related to you by tenderness, not trauma.

I am connected to you by a woman, not fists.


I am related to you by the longest, deepest embrace; not the jackal that wears a doctor's smock.


I am veins, lungs, skeleton, mud, moon, cenote, maize, besos on your lips, inhaling the DNA of your wounds.


Silence will destroy his rage


The wind will gather our ancestral dust:


My grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's grandmother was hurt too


And now they come to be with you, to sleep and dream in your wounds...

The living blues

I don't celebrate my dead
My dead celebrate me
My dead have a hard time being dead
(Just like sometimes I have a hard time being alive)
My dead love being alive
My living abhor death
Life banishes death
Death accepts life
My dead and living love each other
A clacking embrace of skeletal desires
We each practice sleeping without breathing
We each practice breathing without sleeping
We each practice holding each other
We lie and live in a bed of blues
The skin of dreams is black
Our words are our memory of the first kiss
Our lips glazed with blue rouge offering an eternal kiss
I honor my dead by staying alive beyond my means
I carry my dead
in my love,
in my hair,
in my eyes,
in the palms of my blood
I am my dead
I am alive through them
My dead sway in the maize stalks
My dead roll around in the dust and the rain and the mud
My dead flirt, fool around, make fun of the living, they say:
You haven't lived until you've died!

*

The Sonora desert

is the endless dust

of migrants

dead

of stars

banging out

of the walls of deception

Devotion

is the longest walk, the longest memory

of humanity

a milk way of blood and bleached skulls

to arrive in your prickly arms

Our dead

just want to get home

Our living

just want to become dirt again

What men think it strange and crazy

that our bodies feed verdant fields of dirt?

What men carry guns

to herd us into the rows?

What men have lost

their bearings

their roots

wearing nothing but our soil?

A migrant child wails into the stars

A migrant woman places her mouth over the land

A migrant man, made of soils, waters and winds

pauses
before becoming another plant in the sun ...

I wake up in a new body

Arnoldo García (bowing to the spontaneity of the dreaming movement):

I wake up with a new body.

My tattoos are gone, not even a scratch from my horrendous bicycle racing accident. Freddie and I were racing around the house. He decided to change directions because I was beating him. His laughter betrayed his loss in a simple kid’s race. Then around the corner, boom! Head on collision. He went flying and I went flying over our locked handlebars. A spoke from his rear wheel that sprung out in the crash gashed my left cheekbone.

My eye went black. The red was a sign that something was broken or at least ripped.

In one night, my violent past became past. No fingerprints, no chains, handcuffs, no prison depressing solitudes. I almost cried. I looked at my body, tender again.

I could fly again. I could walk into a store and not be followed. I could say hello and smile at the white girls. I could smile with the black and brown girls. And they would turn their bodies toward me, beckoning, lifting their skirts or lowering their blouses in a secret signal.

My lips were no longer blue. My stomach a plains, flatlands, inviting touch, inviting endless embrace.

I was monolingual. Spoke English only. Thoughts were almost a hissing radio, whose antenna was bent, broken, lost in a digital world. The tongue was plainer, rejected the old spices, the old needs to sing and blow kisses at the delight of strange foods. Chocolate sauces, dripping over chicken? Not anymore. Chocolate shakes, yes. Green chiles cut and diced into the beans? Neither was in my monolingual vocabulary or pastas, salads and burgers. My body rejected thoughts that bad tildes and double l’s, double RR’s and vowels that were stoic, unchanging.

In jeans or in a business suit, I was the man that rejected me, put false gods and obstacles in my way. I was the man that said I was mediocre and too ambitious and should be satisfied with my station in the valley.

I became the man who had cheated my grandfathers out of their lands. I became the man who harassed my sisters, my mothers, my aunts. Yes, my body was lustworthy and even these women I despised were attracted to me. But I only did what I did to them to keep them in their place and insult their men. I had their men under my boots and their women in my pants, my slim waist, taunt, taunting.

In my new body, I was what I never wished to be and now had no choice.

I fit in. I passed because I didn’t have to pass any more. I could apply for jobs that before had always been off limits. I could enter the neighborhoods and no one would call the police on me. I could do with my new body what my old body would have landed me in police custody just for entering the wrong, read white, part of town.

White is white. Brown is brown. Skin is not kin. White man over all. If I doubted myself, I was doing them a favor. If I didn’t push hard, I would be falling all over their twisted shadows, mistaking holes for steps, stumbling for achieving heights, smiles for smirks. My new body was both freedom and imprisonment. I was free to do to others as I felt free to do. I knew what would happen to this body, open to drugs, suburbs, long commutes, failed marriages, childless, growing old and being taken care of by my old body. Would they, the old me’s, really take care of me when all this time I made sure to take every advantage of them to put them down, to make them pay thrice over for something that had no value?

My new body was my new fear of decay. My new body was my horizon filled with the sunset glow of carbon monoxide. My new body was no better than my old body. I was possessed by the anxiety of becoming a victim of robbery or homicide. My new body had access to more guns than a terrorist threat. My new body had access to vacations, getaways, women, food, cars, desserts, services, trust funds, cash, credit, assets, land, houses.

You name it. My new body was the old one that in my previous body I had organized against, had protested, had carried hunger strikes, picket lines — anything to embarrass the new body. Even some of my older bodies had organized guerrilla armies, little wars of liberation, bodies barely able to put down their words and feelings into manifestos. But they were old bodies that knew that the new body would only emerge from their old bodies through a big struggle. Many would die, many of the old bodies. And if I was able to, many of the new bodies of the new type.

I emerged from the old body a new mummy. I emerged rotting already. I only knew this because I still had the DNA memory of the old body, the body that was old because of the those bodies that were parasites with PhDs and nukes, prisons and police at their disposal.

My new body was naked, red under the sun, pink under the artificial light of photoshop. My new body was new only to those who were stuck in the same body as the new me. My new body was an old decrepit German that stole my grandfather’s land and knowledge of seeds to become rich and impoverished us. My old body spoke the language of the moist, fertile soil. My new body spoke the language of the banks and debtor’s prisons. My old body spoke the language of bees, seasons and guttural winds that carried ancestral dusts and rivers to the edge of glaciers and sunken cities. My new body spoke of progress and prostitutes. My new body could buy anything except its dignity. Everything had a price in the new body. Everyone had a name, a story and love in the old body.

My new body beat my old body not just into shape. My new body pistol-whipped, enslaved, branded, forced labor, stole even the sweetness of my perspiration to sell it back to me as the aroma of peasant memories. My new body was my old master, my old slave-driver, my old tormentor that drive me off my lands and out of my mind. My new body was only new to those who were not like my old body. My old body, hunchbacked, honeyed, bronzed, was the topography of tenderness after a 18 hour workday. My old body was the rush of the harvest season and the slow cooking pot of winter beans and steaming coffee. My new body was 24/7 neon lights, two weeks here, two weeks there, coitus on the clock, routines, 2000 hour work years. My new body was the precise mathematics of interest rates and retirement funds, sex and disposable laughter, good only for the buck and the bang of the moment. Nothing lasts in the new body as long as the wallet doesn’t get fat.

The new body killed the old body in a war for possession. The new body was born sick with the sickness of private property in land, in men and women, in children for a childless future, in housing, in health, in air, water and soil. The new body owns or wants to own everyone and everything. Everything and everyone is for sale or else worthless.

The new body makes people fail. The new body is the only human that exists. Everyone else is on a shelf at the mall, waiting to be purchased or leased to be owned.

The new body — everyone wants one. Everyone wants to touch me. I am the holy water of the faithful who have no vision, no will, no ideas and parrot even my mistakes. My new body makes the old body believe that God has failed them or that they need to bow even further down into the deepest and raunchiest of prayer. The new body owns the holy words; they are available for rent by soul.

My new body is already embalmed, laid out in designer suits and with aged champagnes waiting to be uncorked in the bubble of delight. The new body is already DOA. Kept alive by the old bodies, the people who still smell of roots and manured soils, whose ancestors were carried by ants out of our mass grave and the ruins of our temples.

My new body is split in three:
The man who has nothing except threats and bank accounts
The man who loves no one and confuses the lover with an armored truck
The man who behaves as if the old bodies and the women must bathe and adore him so that each night aging results in casting off more old bodies.

The new body sleeps in the old me. The old body suffocates and convulses at the sight of the new skin. The new body has no pores, glistening in the air conditioned limelight that only money makes believe. The new body flays the old body, prays through my skull, screeches into my throat, masturbates over the pigment of the old body.

The new body is trembles at the darkness at the ends of his fists. No rage here. Politicians, philosophers, physicists, police, senators, soldiers, generals, warships, submarines, drones, voters, do his bidding. The new body sleeps soundly; someone else gets to worry for him someone else loses their job and future if he fails. The new body is perfect for destroying civilizations and rendering the natural world inhabitable. Not for him but for the old bodies. The new body has a slim nose, oxygen tanks, swimming pools and DNA patents to stay fresh.

I woke up this morning in this new body that craves silk and fresh milk. I woke up crazy.

#iwakeupinanewbody

All photographs by Arnoldo García, from the Katrina series, 2005.

c|s

[Poema 16] Long shot, wide angle

500 years
is a long
movie
a high-definition screen
a wide angle shot
all the details are there
broken bones
broken tongues
weeping women
stick men
shadow peoples
500 years
somebody dreamed this
somebody dreamed something different

Not all our ancestors fell to their knees
for the same reason
some feel to pray
some to convert to christianity

All fell to be close to the land, the power
close to the ancestors
who dreamed a different future.

If you want to be close to the longest dream,
the deepest dream,
dreaming with all the ancestors,
fall to the ground
place your knees on the land
lay your face on the soil
lay still
until the next earthquake,
until the next tremor,
until the next volcano,
revolution is the patience of the earth
earth, the natural world, is the revolution
the revolution is to become an ancestor,
all of them
ancestors all:
four-footed, two-winged, extinct, emerging ancestors
Ancestors that crawled belly-down on the dirt
Ancestors that flew rainbow eyed in the wind
Ancestors that curled under the rotting woods
Ancestors that appeared in the excavations
The revolution is to be an ancestor.

The ancestors all of them smile, chant, chant, chant

What is human after all?
the human revolution
is to return
the flesh and bones,
the blood, skin,
the fingernails, the lungs
to the earth
feed the next ancestors-to-be.

Our nostrils will snort in the dust
Our lungs will return to the sea
Our bones will be scattered by the mouths of the hungry
Our words will rise, evaporate, into the sun
The only map of our human-ness that will survive
will be the constellations
hammering away.

Poetica declaraciones y denuncias | Statements & Protests

 

Arnoldo García

Poetica declaraciones y denuncias | Statements & Protests

A mi abuela y mis hermanos mayores

Manuela Ochoa

John Trudell

Mahmoud Darwish

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Adonis

y otros y otras

porque mis madres y padres

creían en el amor libre

Es decir,

el amor libre de amar y cuidar

sus cultivos,

sus tierras,

las semillas,

las familias

que eran la misma relación,

la mismita cosa

y aún después de ser desplazados a fuerzas

las siguieron cuidando en sus sueños y peregrinajes

Trataban a las tierras ajenas como suyas

las tendían de semillas de ternura

sabían que la tierra se movían según su corazón

y teníamos que ponerle mucha atención a ella

cuando la trabajábamos.

A mi abuelito le dolía tener que usar un tractor

arrastrando el arado,

era demasiado sólo para sembrar semillas

sí era más rápido

pero prefería que le metiéramos las manos

hundiéndolas hondas

en el lodo

en el polvorienta cuerpo

hundirlas hasta sentir el calor de la sangre de ella 

Mis abuelitos rozaban sus cuerpos

contra las hojas de las plantas

Mariposas-migrantes con sus alas

repartían el polén y se sentían pájaro volador

no pájaro-trabajador migrante que el patrón arrastraba sobre sus campos

*

Books say my skin is a symbol for ruin, for decline.

So? Their skin is a symbol for genocide, enslavement, wars, atomic annihilation, the nuclear winter we are entering, zombies, alienation and western civilization? (Gandhi would say, "that would be a good idea.")

My skin is an attitude of altitude,

a relationship of love to the sun

I have been walking for 155,000 years

And since 1492 continuing on the longest walk yet.

Will the molecules of my desire survive their self-destruction?

Will we meet again and again in the big curve of space and time

condemned to repeat the process till they get it right?

My teeth, my skull, my bony bones are on full display in the museums of the world, with total disregard for my sons' and daughters' souls that visit me every once in a while. (It costs a lot of money for my descendents to come visit me in this prison they call a museum. My sons and daughters cry that the whites hold my descendents in prisons too, called prisons and reservations in the north....)

Even though I'd like a burial and ceremony to take me closer to my ancestors and elders

they will only agree to repatriating all of our descendents and ancestors in one big chain reaction of nuclear strikes.

Ah, the wonders of western civilizations!

I propose that we all go back to the first circle,

where we all started

and remind our selves through communal dreaming

that when we meet again in, say, 2012

we reconvene into the original circle,

now in a spiral

hug each other

laugh, cry, get drunk on our community

act like long-lost brothers and sisters

that finally reunite to become a healthy family once again

Avoid the wars, give each other food and love abundantly

share our stories from the long walk

remember and remember how the stars were constant in our eyes

how the rivers, the oceans and her waves, the moon, Quetzalcoátl, and the animals and the plants

all guided us, made us who we are and that we owe them our lives to take care of ourselves as we take care of them

and not destroy, not consume, not fear more than we can hold in our arms.

The big bang does not need to end with a small human poof.

Today land, bread, poetry

Arnoldo García

Land, bread, poetry

Today there is
poetry,
land,
bread
for everyone,
Bread for all,
Tortillas
for those that prefer them.
Poetry for all,
Sonnets for the English-bound
Corridos for the wanderlust
Rap for all my streets
Haiku for revolutions
Cielitos for internationalism
Sones for the chaos of community
Rock n roll for all the old bones
blues for our struggles
The music of the disappeared for the survivors
The stream of consciousness for the undocumented and the bombed out city
Mayakovsky for the eternal working class
Dalton for the ugly utopianists
Pain, pan, pane, خبز, Хлеб, tlaxcalmana, kurinda, fry-bread, buñuelos
with chocolate for all
Land for all
(Except you can't take or have other people's land)
Return the canyons, the plains, the mountains, the rivers, all the sacred places, the forests, the deserts, the waters, the ancestors
to the earth (everywhere, silly)
Land is community, is people, is bread, is poetry.

Land and bread without poetry impossible.
Land, bread, poetry for all, then peace & justice will come.

Poetica snapshot | danzantes on Ohlone lands

 

Arnoldo García

Poetica snapshot | danzantes on Ohlone lands

 

I do not want
to trade
The noise of one empire
For another.
The danzantes are lost
In space
My fists pound
We are in Ohlone lands
Now and forever
The four directions
Are meaningless
Without recognizing
Where we are
Without organizing
Where we belong
Without finding our place
In the cosmos of this land
Ohlone
Oh lone shell
Placed against my lips and spittle
I blast the sun into her own darkness
I scatter the ashes of your lie
The ahuehuetl vibrates
Setting off the car alarms
The danzantes bring in stars, suns, ghosts
They cannot hear anything except the ahuehuetl
The car alarm wails
Cries for the police to arrest
The terrestially cosmic movement
The ahuehuetl beats hearts into one
Serpent ondulating whirling dusty fire
The ahuethuetl stops the siren
The ahuehuetl abuelito flor crumbles the waves
Two students, one Mexican, one Black
Grumble
The Spanish are taking over everything
(They are not happy with the danzantes.)
And I do not want to trade
The noise
Of one empire
For another....

Prohibido no ser humano | Being Inhuman prohibited

 

Arnoldo García

Prohibido no ser humano | Being inhuman prohibited

It was never allowed

Hablar español en la escuela

The white monolingual English-only teacher hit us with rulers, hands, swat-boards

Just for being Mexican

We were human, yet not human enough.

It was never allowed

You couldn’t get away with entering a room and not greet your elders with respect and reverence

To forget your dead, your ancestors and your ancestors to be

To forget the land, the gardens, the fields, where maize, watermelons, frijol grew underneath rooted to the ancestors, all of them

It was never allowed

To forget to pray, to mourn 40 days, 40 nights

and not be de luto for one year

It was never allowed

To talk first and not listen to the elders, the women, the viejitos, the infirm, those on their deathbed

It was never allowed

To receive pay, recognition or praise without work, without sweat, without sacrifice first

To put yourself forward ahead of others

To choose your friends

The squeaky wheel rolled away by itself

It was never allowed

To ignore the people, the community, the viejitas, the matriarchs, with their guidance, their good and best words

Who made us dream together

Who made us work together

Who made us live a shared vision

Who made us share a home, the food, the laughter

Who gave us life

Everyone else was first, you made room for them

Because you knew they were the other you.

Autorretratos | Self-portraits

Arnoldo García

autorretratos | self-portraits

Palabras descalzas

lengua pelada

ojos pelones

corazón descarado

la naturaleza se desviste de humana

*

The communicating

community

transmitting hope

communicating knowledge

barring fear from invasion

human rights communication

where all our words

where all our labors

where all of us are safe

invaluable almost holy

certainly perfect

for each other

Either we transform

the border into a paperless division

or we transform ourselves

into a paperless existence

virtual citizenship without

the internet;

we act like world citizens,

inhabitants of an ecosystem

within the natural world.

We can transcend distances

but not terrains, not geo-

graphy, not the land.

We are place, look for it

talk to those who do know

their/your place

A people is

place

dust

language

seed

hands and tongues and eyes

to recreate her in place.

*

We are dilemma:

no one

is

without

ancestors.

When you don't know

where you're from

who your ancestors

where you bones are buried

where your seed explodes

what season

what time

what color

it is

it is because you

are both descendent

and ancestor

Elder before your time

You pluck yourself from your ribs

You engender new dust

Your bones are sperm & womb for the future

Revolución emplumada

Plumed contradictions of humanity

*

There are tiny apparitions on my tongue:

Guadalupe,

Soles,

whirlwinds of dusts,

tongue-twisting huracancitos,

tempest

shells,

my body her molecules

dispersed

in pleasures

in equal proportions

for every nation, skin

now and in the future

My shadow swimming

toward the impatient sun,

maize,

bultos of human rights movements,

orchards, her ruby veins, the explosion of volcanos

and earthquakes

The DNA

of her thoughts

and curvatures,

the hum of bones

the vibrato of desire

*

Esta poética

es de maíz

es hecha de maíz

sonriente

embarazado

danzantes de polvos y vientos,

arcoirises ondulando

poética-maizal

milpas en mi lengua

las mazorcas lenguas verdes

con sus banderas-manos

alabando soles y campesinos

los pueblos nacen y renacen

en los surcos de sus sueños

mi piel

la mazorca-cama de todas las metáforas verdes

colchas del elote elegante y peligroso

rueda, mástil, pené, vientre

gestado de pueblos indios

palabra antigua, naciendo solos en

la cúmbre de la milpa:

poema tortilla

poema tamale

poema pozole

poema atole

poema palomitas de maíz

poema mezcal

poema pudriento

poema prehispánico

poema molcajete

que pasa hambre para soñar

que sueña para acabar con el hambre

que se llena la boca de tierra

para germinar soles y estrellas

hacerlas cantar aquí.

*

El deseo es la belleza acumulada

La belleza tiene dos piernas

camina para salvarnos

del desierto.

*

Pulpo

palpa

palpo

pulpo

realidades

reales

irreales

proletarias

trabajadoras

no reales

comunas

como

la comuna

de mis manos