I was born in the wrong world

I was born in the wrong world
I was born at the wrong time

In my world you could peer into the waters
So clear
That you could see
all the way
to the other side
of the universe
 the constellations curving around you
in a deep hug

I was born in the wrong world
In my world you could scoop up the dirt
Taste it
Eat it
Drink the soilOn occasion
To commune with the souls of the ancestors
To remember the electricity of the big bang

I was  born in the wrong world
A slave to humans who thought
they could enslave everyone and everything
And I was the soil, I was the stars,
I was unbreakable,
i was another world
that would implode this wrong world
You will return
even if it is on my back
my skin branded
my land demolished
my past scuttled (but not for long)
to the world
where our roots will be the electric grid
where our language will be the banner of the wind
where we will dream by gazing at the stars
where we will weave our lives
with maize squash beans muddy embraces...

New poetry chapbook! Poets against War & Racism | Poetas contra la guerra y el racismo

Order your copies of Poets against War & Racism here.

Here's the first in a series of chapbooks that we will be publishing to read and work together to raise our voices and ink (real & virtual) against the calamaties of capitalism: war and racism.

At the core of our words is the belief that we can create the world, small and big, horizontal and communal, where we are safe to be ourselves, free and self-determined.

To get there we have to create and practice the new language.

So here is a small offering by five poets who are against war & racism and for deep community and justice.

Get one for yourself and get two or more for your friends and families.

Click here to get copies of Poets against War & Racism.

Non-utopias | arnoldo garcía

The options
for
our journey
are narrowing/
capitalism
has
become
a super storm
a deep drought
an arctic quarry
an ocean drowning nations
a war of narco-utopians

Indians
have become
Indians
again
following the gravitational fields of their soul
alongside
ghost buffalo bringing back the humans
aztec dancers joining the swirling galaxies
disappeared women chanting away the desert graves
The transition has become forlorn
no socialist, communist, anarchist realm
awaits on the other side of the barricades or the borders
Your body
has become
the most feared weapon
the only organism capable of self-destruction
destroying the habitat of our ancestors' womb
or restoring our place in the geo-cosmic formation of planters | gatherers
The capitalist realm
The one percent of the one percent
The country of those
who take
the fat of the unborn
have broken the circle,
their circle with humanity
No space ship
No virtual reality
No acid trips
No latter day saints
can transport them out of this christian mess
They crucify the new Jesus on drones
They bomb the new Mohammed at weddings
They grovel at the lungs of our last new Buddhists breath
The holy story has never referred to us the immigrant-indian landless shadow
The holy story is emptiness, erasing our names with zeros, ones and police guns
Nobody understands that our story is in the soil
Nobody realizes that our voices roar, hum and weave the rivers and ocean waves
Nobody who is white or gullible of their shadows understands.
There is no industrial solution
There is no socialist revolution
There is no European pagan sun
Einstein's theorems
Marx's das kapital
My grandmother's plants and prayers
are no match for this problem born in 1492...

The revolution is to be human:
Leave the natural world alone
Turn off
Tune in
Go off-line?
Only the wind, the dust, the waters, the moon, the sun, our smiles are wireless
The rest is either a fiction or a faction of our imagination.
We fight for the right to be in our black and brown skins without fear
We fight for the right to live in community with the natural light
We fight for the right to sing our song in any key in any tone in any frequency
so that bees and butterflies are not molested
so that maize and pollen are free to make love with humans and insects
We have arrived
at the shores
of a broken world
beatened men
impaled women
unlucky new borns
who have inherited a war of worlds
payable through an electronic debit plan
You cannot download utopia or useless ancestors
Your laptop will never have enough memory to install the new old world...

The human story that turns against herself

The human story that turns against herself: forced migrations. Humanity became humanity when she rose up and started walking, following the rhythms and flows of the natural world.

The first migrations were forced by the changes that occurred in the relationship between humans and the natural world. These changes in turn affected and transformed the relationships between humans and humans and those relationships in turn affected the natural world. Our skin, our pigment, tells the story of longer and shorter stays along the longitudes and latitudes of the world. Movement was indispensable till someone, a woman or women, more than likely, among the humans took note of the seeds and caught them at the headwaters of the natural world.

My ancestors walked toward the horizons cut by the rising and falling of the sun. The earth tilted for its seasonal bows to the sun, creating longer and shorter days, shifting the human settlements.

Human movement has been an indicator of social, economic and cultural development. The only borders the earliest human migrations knew were bio-regional, geophysical and followed the movements and migrations of other earthly species more in tune with the gravity of the world. Migration is a shared story among all two-legged, four-legged and other species who like humans were connected to the magnetic fields of life herself.

Along with movement and migrations, all species share the water to live and procreate life and her cycles and her plants and offerings among species to share the energy of the constellations of earthly life in all her shapes and forces. Movement, water and plants are now subjugated to the dominant industrial modes of human settlements.

To be human is to be a nomad.

The most human of humanity today are migrants, who have been forced to leave or flee for their lives, to survive, a cosmic spiral of sorts that links migrants to her first ancestors, who changed their relationships and became more human by walking together.

--arnoldo garcía

Traditions

Arnoldo García

Traditions

"THE BOURGEOISIE, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade." -- The Communist Manifesto

Why is everyone smiling?
Are we things
Are we human
Are we plants
Are we organisms
Are we consumers
Are we workers
Are we professionals
Are we community
Are we a shared DNA pool
locked into shopping, working, spending, accumulating

Am I my clothes
Am I what I own
Am I my university degree
Am I my property
Am I my salary
Am I my laughter
Am I my ancestors
Am I my sons and daughters
Am I my car
Am I my tattoos
Am I East Oakland
Am I Matamoros
Am I Toppenish
Am I Yakama
Am I Ohlone
Am I purépecha
Am I mestizo
Am I humanity
Am I the most disobedient son of mother earth
Am I a smokestack
Am I my ancestor
Am I the long distance runner,
the migrant walking for the last 150,000 years
Am I my bank account
Am I a son of god
Am I a prayer
Am I a profanity
Am I a movie
Am I fast food
Am I a commuter
Am I myself?

Today, I noticed that in the small immediate world
everyone is happy
everyone smiles
everyone walks without a goal, without a destiny
the moment is what counts
the moment when you are in the arms of the woman or man
when you are connected
to the people you love
to the people that you can kiss
in public and in private
with the same, slow intensity
that kiss you save up for passion
to use up for the moments when you are alone.