[Poema 26] The aura of Buddha

Buddha is electrocuted
Buddha is dead
Buddha surges upward
a lotus of lightning
he cuts down four trees
to water, to vomit space
for the other four to grow
he cut down the trees
of suffering
of void
of impermanence
of impersonality
For there is nothing wrong
with suffering
except that suffering is
not an acceptable mode
of conversation over expresso
you don't exist
when you beg ragged
on sidewalks
passed out in passageways
with only soiled clothes and a flute
you are no one
and when you die
no one misses your death
personality is a funnel
for money
or it is a nothing

Buddha beckons
you to the shade
the shade of permanence
the shade of joy
the shade of personality
the shade of perpetuity
You are here until you
get it right, a fire, a wisp of smoke
you are light that
materializes in laughter
you are a human vessel
a human root
a human path
a spiraling, tornado, hurricane
with broad branches
red veins protruding
through the open skin
of leaf
Buddha has cut down with
the axe of his death
and four trees remained
standing
yet you seek the
withered flesh
of trees
the paper sun folded
to slap down flies
or create rubbish
out of tongues
You learnéd ones
you can distinguish
languages
but you cannot hear
the tongues
of tenderness
of solidarity
of human suffering
you are here
the roar of an extinguished night

[Poema 24] Blues on the horizon & shells in my house

Before my last heartbeat
I want to accompany Billie Holiday
with my jarana and my soul
Find a corner in an alley
of a brick building
where her voice will echo
all the way to the Río Grande Valley
where her flower will never wilt.

Before my last breath
I want to place my mouth
over the Grand Canyon
howl at the cruel insistent winds
that have carved a gash on my lungs
where tourist take their photographs
leaving trash behind
pavement
drive-by shootings
and I to let the wind continue
with her inhumane operation
giving the earth open heart surgery

Before my love withers away
I will smooth your face
place my hands in the curvature of space
where her hips have carried humanity
since the day I was left alone
You will not cry again
except to gasp at what my body does to yours.

Before the last word is thought
I will forget everything I have done
and regret all the time I was without you,
the terrible storms
that demanded tenderness
not pills
to quell and soothe
to place my arms around yours
to love and not blame
to surrender and not forget

*

En mi casa
habitan caracoles
donde descansan y sueñan
las espirales de mi lengua
y sus múltiples lenguajes
Mi
lengua
serpiente
espiral
espiritual
en la casa del caracol

Mi lengua
es un huracán
para llegar
al Pacífico
de tus ojos turbulentes
Hay que traspasar
por la doble tormenta
de mi cuerpo y su lenguaje:
vientos caracoleados
empujados
por la tranquilidad
el sol
de
infinitas
cuchillas

Mi lengua
está hecha
de los huesos más
versátiles
en la historia
de huesos y lenguajes
Es el pulpo
en el mar de los sonidos cósmicos
y lenguas terrestres
que se arrastran
a rodillas
peregrinos
a la catedral
de tus oídos

*

Que fascinante
cargar la vida
un rato
envuelta
tejida
pegada
descomponiéndose
pudriéndose
floreciendo
sobre este
esqueleto universal
bajo el cielo mimbrado

my skin, my tongues
my tattoo history, my whirlwind words
my liquid suns
her roots, vines
scurrying patiently
tightening, twisting
around my skeleton
I squeeze into a cave
a sideways womb
of dust, mud, rock
my ancestral mother
chanting, grunting, panting
sweat lodge
my body...

Driving from East to West Oakland
to See Our Walls Speak (part 1)

One Sunday a week after the BART police killing of Oscar Grant III I took a drive from Oakland's eastern edge with San Leandro, driving down Foothill and then turning right on 103rd or so and driving west on East 14th, aka International Boulevard, all the way to West Oakland, to drive a bit on Mandela Parkway and the surrounding neighborhoods.

I took photographs of murals, graffitti and other commercial and non-commercial art on walls and in windows.

This is the visual record of that Sunday morning driving east to west with a beautiful sun shining on our tragedies and daily tribulations of work, family, community and survival.

There is a battle between art, graffitti, tagging and commercial art, decorative art that advertizes. The contradictions abound.

Our walls speak whoever writes or paints on them. Like the mural above, tagged with some "consideration," that is making the tag almost a part of the mural, blending it like streaks in her hair? A second tagger or color however disrupts and mars whatever was friendly in the first tag.

What does this mural depict? This is the legendary myth of Popocateptl, "the smoking mountain" (the "warrior" on the right) and Cicihuatl Chicihuatl Itzaccihuatl, the sleeping mountain (I can't remember the spelling right now, I'll correct it later!).

This is the personification of two volcanoes that are in the Valley of Mexico and have been depicted as a Aztec warrior watching over his "sleeping beauty." This is the eurocentri interpretation. This myth is painted and protrayed everywhere, from restaurant and grocery store calendars given out free every new year to countless those paimted by anonymous community muralists on public and private walls in the Southwest, in Mexico and other parts of the Mexican-friendly world.

Here's a close-up
The figures do not look "Indian" -- although undoubtedly there are Mexican indians that can pass and are off-spring of Europeans who forced themselves on Indian women, some inter-married, many didn't.

Popocatepetl continues rumbling and is linked up and down the Pacific rim of the Americas with what's known as "the ring of fire" -- active volcanoes, the last major eruption was back in May of 1980 when Mt. St. Helens blew up. Now there's a volcanoe in Alaska spewing and melting a glacier in the process. Global climatic change at home.

With this new knowldege, then the myth of Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl takes on a different story. When sleeping beauty wakes up she's gonna make us pay!

Here's another close-up of the mural:
Here a tagger placed his/her spray on his leg, a clumsy attempt at blending or just plain defacement, as the artists or painters of this work would not-so-gently or nicely say.

I kept driving east, sometimes dangerously, as I pointed my camera in the direction of art on the buildings along East 14th/International Boulevard.















More art on the walls, of varying quality and skill:

I messed this shot up because I didn't pay attention to the stop sign's shadow over the portrayal of the girls playing jump rope.











Here's a mural at the East Oakland Youth Development Center wall, on 82nd and East 14th.

All these shots were taken while driving.









Further down East 14th:
She was a beautiful apparition from Michoacan or Africa.

This is a student mural done by students at Melrose Leadership academy, defaced by taggers and then the tagging was painted over. This mural is particuarly significant because MLA students organized a protest demanding a traffic light for community safety. MLA students did an action, taking over the street, creating a human chain and stopped traffic. And they got a traffic light installed! This happened about 2002?

Mural on the two floor facade of the Catholic Worker building:


This mural depicts Latin American heroes, Che, Bishop Romero of El Salvador and others.











Here's a blend of commercial and cultural mural on the facade of the Corazon del Pueblo:

This is a much better version of Latin Americanist Indigenist-oriented mural theme, which inspires Chicano mural painters and others, and has its long roots in the Popocatepetl/Iztaccihuatly theme and imagery.

The mural atop Corazon del Pueblo is developed and stylistically speaking in quite great form.

Corazon del Pueblo us my type of shop, it has Chicano/Mexicano "kitsch" and fine art, including music CDs, postcards, earrings and other jewelry, ceramic pottery, Virgen de Guadalupe and Frida Khalo pseudo-devotional art that I love to hang on my doorways and walls, huipiles, guayabaeras and posters of Mexican revolutionary icons and lots of knick-knacks for all occasions ! And on top of all this, Corazon del Pueblo truly is a cultural center, with a back room, a speakeasy of a new type, where the owner opens to community meetings, mounts fine art shows and allows many of us to put on poetry readings, musical offerings and other cultural activities inside and in front of her store.