human status for all

human status for all:

birds,

oceans,

mountains,

uranium, 

rivers,

deserts,

worms,

jaguares,

bears,

fish,

whales,

wind,

soil,

waters,

migrants,

hummingbirds,

butterflies,

snakes,

insects,

bacteria,

germs,

shells,

mammals,

amphibians,

bipeds,

quadripeds,

all animals,

insects,

dogs,

coyotes,

wolves,

plants,

cats...

Animal status for all:

humans,

whites,

blacks,

browns,

yellows,

greens,

teas, republicans, democrats,

communists,

anarchists,

our languages

transmen, transwomen, queers, straights, curved,

the border patrol

the police

the homeless,

the rich,

the technocrats,

the evil bankers,

the corporativists...

On earth day,

all power to the animal people,

the web of life,

All power to the natural world without us...

poem & photograph: arnoldogarcía
Detail of mural on MacArthur Boulevard (near Mills College) in Oakland, California.

Si fuera human@

Si fuera human@

sería una mujer

con puños de ternura llena de espinas
me preocuparía sólo por mis hijas
Amaría libremente
al hombre que me hiciera reír de la filosofía
El hombre que no lastimara a las hormigas o a mis lágrimas.

Si fuera human@
No tendría miedo del desempleo
No tendría miedo de la distancia que me separa de ella
No tendría miedo de nada, sólo del no poder amar bajo la lluvia de inviernos desesperanzados

Si fuera human@
tú estarías contenta, más valiente de lo que ya eres
tú podrías vivir en donde se baja el sol y en donde amanece sin perder tu lugar.

Tú dirías:
Tu piel arrugada, tus pulmones desgastados no importan
Sólo que tu corazón late entre mis manos
Sólo que tu sonrisa es un machete, arma en contra de mi oscuridad
Que tus cicatrices son el ADN de mi placer
Si fuera human@
La utopía sería ahora
A donde vayamos, en donde estemos…

El camino a la utopía es la utopía | the path to utopia is utopia [poema cero de abril/Zero poem for April]

1

El camino
a la utopía
es la utopía

2

hoy celebraban
a césar e. chávez
y los campesinos seguían trabajando
bajo un sol de machetes
nadie los celebró a ellos

3
hoy dos campesinos
cercas de riverbank
con azadones
estaban limpiando
una labor de fresas
un hombre
y una mujer
dos campesin@s
caminando, cabeza agachada
en un mar verde
que se mecía
con olas de viento empolvado

4
los zurcos
son las tumbas
más suaves
del mundo
allí enterramos semillas y sudor
y luego cuando
germinan
crecen
brotan
y se estiran hacia el cielo
con nuestras manos
las piscamos
y nos comemos
nuestros muertos hechos de
fresas
cebollas
chiles
chícharo
tomates
frijoles
sandía
calabacita
maíz
tierra
agua
sol

5
el camino
a la utopía
es la utopía...

*

The road to utopia is utopia

1

The road
to utopia
is utopia

2

Today they are celebrating
César E. Chávez
and the farmworkers do not stop working
underneath a sun of machetes
no one is celebrating them

3
today two farmworkers
close to Riverbank
swinging hoes with their hands
were cleaning
a field of strawberries
a man
and a woman
two farmworkers
walking, their heads bent down
in a sea of green
that swayed
under waves of dusty wind

4
the rows
were the softest
graves
of the world
there we bury seeds and sweat
and then when
they germinate
crecen
bloom
and reach for the sky
with our hands
we harvest them
and we eat
our dead made of
strawberries
onions
chiles
peas
tomates
beans
watermelon
squash
maize
soil
water
sun

5
the road
to utopia
is utopia ...

Soy del otro lado | i am from the other side

Soy del otro lado
del lado bravo
del lado tuyo
del lado izquierdo
donde tengo el nido
para tus abrazos
Soy del otro lado
donde los muros
son las sombras
que persiguen
a los policías
que defienden
a los tiranos del mercado
Y el sol está
a nuestro lado
el lado de la tierra
el lado de las lágrimas con sus sonrisas
el lado de la luna llena y vacía
el lado que es combustible para las estrellas
el lado donde somos íntegros
el lado que divide a las bestias
adomándolas con nuestra luz
el lado que nos abriga
contra la rabia del dinero
Soy de ese lado
con sus seis direcciones y sus siete espacios
donde los abrazos abren cielos y puertas
donde los llantos espantan a las fronteras
y las mujeres nos dan su espalda
para cargarnos y sobrevivir
Del lado donde nuestros desaparecidos
reaparecen
Soy del otro lado
del lado tuyo...

*

I am from the other side
from the side of the Bravo
from your side
from the left side
where there is a nest
for your embraces & love
I am from the other side
where the walls
are shadows
that persecute
the police
who defend
the tyrants of the market
And the sun is
at our side
on the side of the earth
on the side of the tears with her smiles
on the side of the full and the empty moon
the side that is fuel for the stars
the side where we are whole
the side that divides the beasts
taming them with our light
the side that protects us
against the rage of money
I am from that side
with her six directions and seven spaces
where our embraces open skies and doors
where our crying intimidates borders
and the women give us their backs
to carry us and survive
From the side where our disappeared
reappear
I am from the other side
from your side...

*

poem & art: arnoldo garcía

Ayotzinapa | ayotzin beloved turtle

Picasso can't be confused with any other painter.

Late Picasso: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints, 1953 1972

BOOK REVIEW 

Arnoldo García

In "Late Picasso," covering the last two decades of his life and art production, Picasso re-examines, remarks, re-evaluates and takes off from his own work and those of his peers and ancestors. He does not re-paint, he does not repeat himself as much as builds on his oeuvre, visiting, no retaking and occupying, the highest vantage points of his work. Late Picasso is a deeper, newly found Picasso. Older yet now slower. He is quoted as saying that in while one one day he draws and sketches and paints hundreds other painters spend 100 days on one painting.

A painter I admire much once told me that Picasso was over-rated. I did not ask after her why. Poring over each page of "Late Picasso," squinting at the paintings reproduced, he has completely reached another level, twisting-inside-out of the skin of Cubism, distortions that create a new lens of focus. While some of his late work may appear to verge on the sloppy, closer and closer inspection says otherwise. yes, his precision changed but his output didn't. In the 20-volume catalog of his complete work, more than half was produced during the period covered by "Late Picasso."

In art, in poetry, in painting, there are no accidents. In Picassos, there were no accidents.

Picasso painted his daily life, made meaning from his studio, from his relationships to women and other painters, friends and political unfoldings. Picasso made a chronology of art and the artist of a new type out of the life of his imagination. Picasso feared death, dying. This spurred him on to paint and paint, knowing that one day -- whether alive and incapacitated by age or dead, which to him we're the same -- he would not be able to. Picasso made many drafts and versions of his work, from sketches, to paintings to sculpture and collages. He then would paint his paintings, create sculptures from his paintings, an auto-locura [a self-crazyness], creating in the process a new process and fusion of what he had produced and accomplished and then some.

One of my favorite poets wrote that it was a crime for a poet to not write, to not produce poetry, every day. Picasso acted in the same way, literally to the day he died. For us, Picasso not painting was a crime to humanity.

Picasso evolved and emerged out of himself a few times over, a butterfly emerging out of the one cocoon where he created several lifetimes. Not reinventing himself but becoming a creator anew, not stuck on his accomplishments, pushing himself -- and in the process art, artists and us viewers-- to new limits.

Maybe many of us would have stopped, and maybe even the majority of work forgotten, after painting "Guernica." Picasso did no such thing. Ceramics, sculpture, collages, mural-sized paintings, poetry, theater, love making in all, Picasso's work will take many more eyes and generations to settle accounts. His last painting was an open work, yet to be finished or even started. The last painting? He left a blank canvass, signed: Picasso.

Over-rated? Maybe.

Great, yes.

Individual, yes.

No one will confuse Picasso with anyone else other than Picasso.

Found poem | Piercings

just in sudden silence
the sound of bones and flesh tearing
the sound of a mouth being beaten
blood
in our eyes
I
you (with emphasis)
in the heart,

where the mind and the emotions

are jailed

I disappear

in the Nez Perce

place of creation,

Heart of the Monster,

heading towards Kamiah, Idaho.
your mamá (not your mother)
without tongue, with cut tongue, with tongue removed
he, she, or us

lit all through the night
I reappear in

the ghost’s trail

the Milky Way...

c/s

We are all picassos

We are all Picassos.

Todas y todos somos picassos.

My DNA is digital

my besos are analogue

I spin through space

two eyes here

two mouths there

the mother displaced, distorted, missing in Michigan 

the father invisible, drowned,

dismembered on the canvas of fertile grandmothers

I arrived piece by piece across the migrant spectrum of soul

I will be buried and the earth will be whole again and again

My fate is twisted, a twister, a storm of tenderness

My days are here with you

My nights become DNA,

I spin and float reassemble

myself in your bodies

I ghost other worlds

parallel soul parking

fitting carefully between two bodies

My love is DNA

my hate is analogue

Borderless not wireless

My head leans against the head of Coatlicue

My ears are pounded by the drumming

of wars plummeting through my skin

We are all artists

our tongues the brush

our veins the palette of colors

the rio bravo pleading to jump tracks

and wash herself of the maquiladora blood

Picasso made flesh offerings for our eyes to see

Guadalupe buried our placenta in her cries

Today is the day I will eat prickly pears with lemon and chile

smile against the sun

know that everything and everyone I love

will burst from my pores and my senses will make clouds

free the rain from the prison of pipes, asphalt and dams

Two or three more world wars

Ten, twenty, thirty revolutions

Where we disarm the men with guns and pigmentation

we'll get it right

we'll figure out how to be together

dance and not damn ourselves together

Wind 

Water

Land 

Our bodies return whole to the spiderweb,

gently feed the cosmos...

Si Rafael Alberti hubiera sido campesino...

Si Rafael Alberti hubiera sido campesino

Yo soy campesino

marinero en la tierra,
migrante de las olas y las ondas semilleras,
navegante sin papeles y fronteras

Refugiado en los zurcos de nuestra América
poesía de pala, azadón y tractores
marinero en las labores de la verdura y la ternura...

human status for all | viva la tierra/earth lives

human status for all:
birds,
oceans,
mountains,
uranium,
rivers,
deserts,
jaguares,
bears,
fish,
whales,
worms,
wind,
soil,
waters,
migrants,
hummingbirds,
butterflies,
snakes,
insects,
bacteria,
germs,
shells,
mammals,
amphibians,
bipeds,
quadripeds,
all animals,
cold-blooded,
warm-blooded,
dust,
seeds,
pollen,
dogs,
wolves,
cats...

Animal status for all:
whites,
blacks,
browns,
yellows,
greens,
teas,
republicans,
democrats,
communists,
anarchists,
utopians,
men,
women,
children,
ancestors,
elders,
queers,
transspiriteds,
the blind,
the deaf,
the mute,
the undocumented,
homeless,
the rich,
the technocrats,
the evil bankers,
the neoliberalists,
the corporativists...


On earth day,
all power to the animal people,
the web of life,
the natural world without us...

*

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...

what is lost | arnoldo garcía

I cannot take back
what I lost
what I lost
now belongs to another
If I take back
what I lost
I will have to take it away
from another I
I cannot take back
what I lost
what I lost
is only found in my memory
a body that needs another
to be found
to be whole
to be un-lost
without having to take back
from another
who is just
another I
Another I
who is lost
And cannot take me back
without taking away from me
what is lost...

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

my status is Palestine

My status is Palestine
There are no walls between our lands, our skins, our hearts
Palestine is the horizon of humanity
I am Palestine
I am nomad on the longest walk to return to her
Palestine: either we are all free or we are all fucked.
Hold my hand
Hold my body
Hold my head
Hold my tears
From your bed to the workplace
From the long-distance phone calls to your voice
Hold me Palestine
Her first name is love
Her last name is peace
She will hold me
For she is Palestine
The land is Palestine
The sea is Palestine
The sky is Palestine
The moon is Palestine
The sun is Palestine
And
wherever I stand
wherever I dream
wherever I cry
wherever I love
wherever I live and die
Palestine

My status, write it down, is Palestine ...

ABC's Palestine Free Free Free!

Amantes Yes

apartheid no
Beauty Yes
border walls no
Collective Tenderness Yes
collective punishment no
Democracy Yes
dictatorship no
Equality Yes
expulsions no
Freedom yes
fascism no
Gaza Yes
garrisons no
Hugs Yes
hate no
Intifada Yes
identity cards no
Justice Yes
jackals no
Keffiyehs Yes
kkkisraelis no
Land Yes
landlords no
Mohammed Abu Khudeir Yes
military murderer-monsters no
Nectar Yes
nakba no
Orgasms Yes
occupation no
Palestine Yes
police-state no
Qasidas Yes
qualudes no
Return Yes
racism no
Solidarity soul Yes
settlers no
Tierra أرض Yes
takers no
Uprisings Yes
Untrammeled people Yes
Victory Yes
victims no
Water Yes
weapons no
X of the heart Yes
x of the barbed-wire no
Yearning Yes
Y of the arms open to embraces Yes

Y of the Palestinian flag fluttering in my veins Yes
Zhrah Yes
Zatoon Yes
Zahra Yes
Palestine free yes...