I am closing in | Day 10 & 11 | poetry month

I am closer to life than to death
I am closer to tenderness than to hate
I am closer to breath than to silence
Every day becomes an answer to taking sides
Every night I ingest the suns that will never be ours

I am closer to horizons than to forgetfulness
I am closer to the next woman than to his oblivion
In five years or five lifetimes

I would never change the molecular structure of my bed
I would dream with the same woman
whose tears have become tiny gashes on the wrists of hurricanes

I am closer to the wind than to the smokestack
I am closer to the dust than to the rails of capital exploitations
I am closing in on the predator that has made our skin impossible

I am closer to you than to my mortality
I am closer to your suffering than my own
My senses are craters on your body
My body sister to your menstruating lands



















I am closer to her water than to the desert
I am closer to her light than to the sorrow.
She revives the sun, gifts it to heal the first wound.
Her body becomes the next sun,
the next beginning,
the first kiss of humanity.

***

He believes the woman that wants to destroy him
She doubts the man that loves him

She is life under siege
She is resisting, her eyes cry knives:
An eye for an eye to blind the monster
An eye for an eye to love blindly

I am closer to power because I am with her
I am closer to the moaning ocean wave because I hear her
I am closer to the ripening sky because of her skin of clouds
I am closer to the sun because I walk alongside her
Now, I am closer to being human than to being forgotten

***

Notas sobre "Standing Bear is a Person: The true story of a Native American's quest for justice" ...

I
El derecho de existir
como humano,
en cualquier lugar del mundo,
en cualquier tiempo de la tierra,
es la revolución es ser humano...

II
Pasaportes de la piel
costumbres de clases sociales
el gruñir de los géneros
esto no durará



III
Dos estrategias
frente a la expropiación, la apropiación, la anexión
sin consulta, impuesta:
1. Asimlarse, "civilizarse:"
ciudanizarse para prosperar
acomodarse al lugar que le dan

2. Autonomía, resistencia, resistir
a ser iguales para ser diferentes, consultar, proponer
desciudadanizarse, reconocer,
practicar ser humano,
practicar los derechos humanos
cuidar la tierra, el agua, el viento,
que es cuidar a las y los antepasados,
la sangre, los lugares ancestrales, sagrados, los pulmones--las redes
humanas que como las velas
de las carabelas toman viento
y transforman
o hacen a las y los de arriba incómodos,
desacomodadores humanos.



IV
Tenemos que insistir en nuestros nombres
en nuestra autodeterminación,
en nuestro autorespeto, autodefensa, el único
auto
en que nos subiremos
para emprender este viaje,
que nos puede llevar de viaje,
la autonomía.

V
Todas las ciudades y poblados
sin importar que importantes
sean o marginalizados e
insignificantes,
están rodeados
de labores agrícolas, agua
y la mano de obra para que
florezcan:
Tambos de agua,
árboles, verde y verdura,
colchas de zurcos, canales y arroyos
de agua, manos que hacen los
tubos sorber y ahogarse, lodo (xocolatl)
las y los antepasados en flujo
desplegándose hacia las semillas y las estrellas

VI
La norma humana, la persona, la personalidad humana
no puede ser el blanco, eurocéntrico
monolingüe ciudadano estadounidense.
EEUUtopía es la globalización gabacha,
gabacha en su sentido original,
(en inglés le llaman "ecological footprint,"
es decir la huella
o el peso sobre
o la ocupación de
o el consumo
de la naturaleza):
las y los que con sus patas grandes
pisan y machucan
a las plantas,
a los animalitos y
a los lugares sagrados
a las y los humanos
y pisotean y dan patadas
con los dedos gordos
de sus pies y manos
a las y los demás
para servirse primero...

Next stop for the Earth and what are you gonna do about it?

The world doesn't stop for humans. She keeps spinning, wobbling around the sixth sun.

Lately, she's hobbling after being badly hurt once again by human activity that humans, some of us, call corporate greed for oil, profits, accumulation for private consumption.

BP was drilling into the crust of the earth, to suck up oil to process into fuel for our cars, trains, and other energy and forms.

We are now living under one of the worst oil spills in human history after an explosion ripped open a gash in her belly allowing crude to swoosh up in hundreds of thousands of gallons per day, poisoning everything in its wake.

Humans, specifically corporate humans, are responsible for the spill; it was not an accident; the spill is a warning and a sign that our relationship to the natural world doesn't work.

The human corporate polluter, ravager of the earth, has a name, British Petroleum, BP. And he has accomplices, every day sitting in gridlock on their way to shop, work or home.

The Big Bang Strikes Again at the Belly-Button of the Moon

Six millions years ago, give or take a few millennia, an asteroid ripped into earth, gashing a crescent wound into the continent where the Yucatán peninsula now sits. The impact was of such an intensity that part of the earth was lopped off and drifted into space, eventually becoming our moon.

Humans in the Mesoamerican region venerated the almost perfect arc after arc of cenotes, wells (that were created by the backfire of the asteroid's impact on the earth), that covered the Yucatán peninsula. The cenotes were treated as sacred portals or places that were given human and plant sacrifices or offerings.

Mesoamerican naturalists thousands of years ago made the connection between the moon and Mesoamerica and began calling the entire region Mexico. Mexico is the Spanish-ized version of Mexica (pronounced: meh shee kah), formed by the fusion of two Nahuatl language words, metztli (moon) [pronounced: mets-tuhlee] and xictli [sheek-tuhlee] (belly-button) "Belly-button of the Moon."

The asteroid's destruction of animal and plant life created the sediment that eventually over millions of years was compressed and transformed into crude. Coal, oil, in other words, fossil fuel, are the remnants of animal and plant life, which humans have learned badly to use as fuel for extremely short-sighted needs. Human dominant industrial social formations, mainly Europe and the U.S. are using up the past faster than we can create the future, any future that might be sustainable or survivable for humans.

The Wétiko Disease: Gulf of Mexico Oil Disasters

This is the second oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In the 1980s another oil rig accident caused a tremendous oil spill. I lived in south Texas, close to Padre Island, at the time and I remember the oil clumping into fist-sized balls of crude. The beaches, the sea-life, the water suffered tremendously; other than sitting on the beach sands, the gulf waters were deadly to all life forms.

But no one should worry.

Humans, especially those of us who have lived under and through the the dominant industrial society cannot destroy the earth. We can only destroy the habitat, the eco-systems of air, water and soil, that support human life.

What is destroying us is what Jack Forbes, renown Native American scholar and poet, calls the "wétiko" disease. Jack Forbes writes, the wétiko disease is "... the consuming of another's life for one's own private purpose or profit."

The wétiko disease is the disease of possession, that anyone of us can own land or build, drill, shovel it around -- or in the case of BP, oil that is over five thousand feet below the surface of the Gulf waters -- without consequences.

The U'wa a few years ago reminded humans, especially those of us from the dominant industrial societies, that the oil in the land and under the crust of the earth is there for its own reasons.

The oil is part of the balance and once you pilfer it, suck it up into ocean carriers and transport it to refineries, we will pay a heavy price, said the U'wa. The whole process of unbalancing comes to the fore. The result? The current and most deadly spill ever of crude gushing from the bottom of the Gulf.