[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.

[Poema 18] How we got this sick

In Boston a white man
attacks two women
because they have their heads covered
with a veil, a hijab
He punches, kicks, curses their wombs
She does not defend herself
she stand
taking all the blows
for us
The white man leaves his rage on her body



A dark skinned male has set off the bombs.
A dark skinned male has ordered the drone attacks.
Dark skinned males are on the war's front-lines, in prison, unemployed, guilty.
The epicenter of the explosionsfrom Al-Mutanabbi to Boylston Street
From cultural centers and bookstores to the marathon's finish line?
Men with guns, bombs, nukes & IEDs, with domination on their minds
War widows, war orphans, war veterans, the war President, war economies, war schools, war children, war, war, war, war.
Car-bombs, suicide bombers, B-52 bombers, Drone missiles,
We are all now hibakusha.
Strontium 90 in the hummingbird's flurry of wings
Uranium depleted peoples, the radiation of hate
How will our story end?
What story will we tell,
who will hear us?
What scale
of tragedy
of loss
of anguish
of implosion
do you need
so that you will want
to hear and tell our story
to share the scars
to heal the wounded fists
to acknowledge our disappeared
to unbury our ancestors?
A tsunami, a Ciudad Juárez,
an Oakland drive-by,
a drone attack,
the boys and men imprisoned in Guantánamo,
a sister with blood cancer,
a flattened Haiti,
a woman beaten by a man every thirty seconds,
a mother with her children living in the street,
an unpublished writer-dishwasher,
a day laborer who speaks neither english nor spanish,
an abandoned baby,
a burned out barrio,
a hunger for company in the solitude of poverty,
begging in front of bookstores,
a student in debt for life,
a man left alone who no one will touch,
a Cuban rafter,
an indigenous migrant farm-worker,
a war widow,
a junkie,
a loner in the middle of everyone?
A dream for a people without dreams
from a dream without people?
Books not bombs?
Marathons not massacres?
Let the drones be drones again,
pollinating plants and humans
How many times do we say:
An Iraqi, a Pakistani, an Afghanistani, a Mexican, a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Maya, a migrant, a woman's
life
is worth the same
cries the same
has the same family
has the same desires and ecstasies
Europe does not have to die for América Indígena to live
Blood for oil.
The violence
amputates the arms of violinists and herbalists
tears up our languages into oblivion
dissects screams
leaves a crater on my tongue
muting the pleasures of our lips

The best anti-war medicine:
The land belongs to herself,
We belong to the land
where our bones are standing, armed, at attention
a gleaming silvery army of ruptured laughter

We are all Baghdad, Birmingham, Boston...

We have more cities, towns, streets, plazas in waiting
waiting for their crater,
their dismembered,
their wailing
their rebirth,
their blast-off for the stars
peaceful cafés,
homes for everyone,
schools that are schools
freedom that is freedom
Languages that speak,
that do not growl threats & carries them out.