Arnoldo García

Poetry is always in the Streets

Snap Review

Fuck Poetry: Bread Is The Politik of the Hungry

By Chaun Webster
Cover Art by Ricardo Levins Morales
Published by Free Poet's Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0-615-38653-9

In your face poetry is not for everyone. Especially, if the poet has freedom on her mind. Yet all poetry is in your face; you choose how close you want to get -- her intensity depends on how you accept or push back on the intimacy that forms in the space between your eyes, the inked page, your brain and the poet. Fuck Poetry: Bread is the Politik of the Hungry is no exception. Yet, Fuck Poetry's exceptionalism lies in how the author intentionally, no inseparably, links his class/race/gender working class-based full-color dream of revolution with no compromises.

Fuck Poetry takes aim at the real and pushes hard against commercialized culture, including poseurs and pimps that might breed off the contradictions of a racialized class society.

All poets who live and die by their words, or at least believe they would or could, share this impatience for the way the rotten world is. In poems, this poet knows what needs to be done to make things right, including how to make everyone human again. Love poets or class-struggle poets -- we're the same and accept rejection like a knife in the eye.

We Are All Poets, Really (except some are for and some are against liberation...*)

In the beginning, Chaun Webster slams poets who wordsmith and word-shine. He writes with the same honed wordsmithing except his is a radicalized vocabulary of political power and of the authentic self:

Fuck poetry that does not speak with actions
having verbs bouncin off papyrus
like ancient hieroglphic patterns
signalin change that matters
more than the currency
these currents be
comin from history-
the people are tired of mystery
in communication
going to coffee shops
hearin some nigga
with dreads
and a ratted beard
talkin about reality PG
when the shit is X rated
this shit is amazin...

He ends his introductory poem-chant by coming clean:

Fuck poetry if it is not loud
with more than the volume that
comes from the larynx
we need poems clothed
with bareness of reality
so don't be mad at me
cuz i'm in contradiction
cuz when I said in the beginnin
fuck poetry
i failed to mention
it's the only thing keep me livin

Webster provides his readers with a politik dictionary with poems on: Assata Shakur, political prisoner who escaped from a U.S. prison and now lives in exile in Cuba; the politics of radical's reaction to imperial events; a lot of out loud philosophical introspections, rants and inquiries into U.S. class and color realities.

Webster lays bare his frustrations at lack of revolutionary changes. Webster puts on paper his language challenge to the power of the State, exposing the normalized repression/oppressions, writing in places:

I swallow whole resistance histories
and spit people's justice
at the paper tiger...
i am not a poet
having temporarily traded
my pen
for the machine-gun
i am a guerrilla
i am angry
and i will never forget
the face of my enemy

Is this magical poetry? That is, those of who believe in the transformative power of our words, that by saying something, we unleash a consciousness-virus, a viral infection that challenges the reader, especially the cynic and apolitical to see reality through our political lense but who may not see anything but irreality and political fantasy in works like Webster's that are thoroughly political.

What's the use of poetry, especially poetry like Webster's? Paraphrasing the Old Man of working class revolution Karl Marx, who didn't understand the significance of race and racism in his time:

The poets have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Webster's launches from the first into trying to change the world, even if it's one word at a time in his chapbook...

(*This subtitle is a paraphrase of the wonderful red poet Walter Lowenfels poetry chapbook, "We Are All Poets, Really.")

Arnoldo García

The segregation of bodies, the segregation of minds

When I started reading Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement, by Farzaneh Milani, there were what seemed countless explosions in my imagination and brain and body about how we as writers of color, Xicanos/Xicanas, Mexicans, Purépechas, Latinas, even Hispanics, or whatever you want to call yourself, have been segregated -- to no avail. Yet we are the mainstream: our stories, musics, and other experiences expressed are just ours and those who have ignored them and continue ignoring them will not know what hit them when their country becomes also ours in word and in colors.

Take note U.S.A., this is what América sounds like too: On page 29, Farzaneh Milani writes, "Sex segregation has had a powerful impact on Iranian literature.... has shaped the language, the themes, the plots and the systems of literary representation used by men and women over the centuries." And the good words over the bad swords take off even deeper from here on end.

There have deep structural political, social, economic and their corresponding cultural devastations worldwide. The current Arab and Middle East Spring, the massive uprisings and movements toppling old regimes is linked to us in many and varied ways. The U.S. had a "Migrant Spring" that opened its new season in 2006. Millions of undocumented migrant workers, their families, communities and supporters took to the streets demanding a change -- that has yet to come. However, the massive movement that continues growing in dissendence and dissoance, changed the political landscape of the U.S. forever. Undocumented people are everywhere, including U.S. citizens whose rights and dreams are being foreclosed, unemployed, and privatized. The future of workers and poor people, communities of color looks more and more like the undocumented, the "illegal." Words can become destiny.

War, Not Swords has given me a new and unfolding understanding of the relationship and impacts and influence over those who've marginalized my writing and stories, acting as if there is no genre or branding is available, unless they make sense to their markets, er I mean readers. If Syracruse University Press can get their readers to pick up this exciting work, then they should be able to see our work as not just for colored people who've gestated and given birth to the rainbow, when suicide was never enough to ake anyone understadn our words aching to be heard by everyone.

A whole new world of understanding of what I as a writer of color, a bilingual, truly multinational/multicultural/multiracial, writer, communities-based organizer face every time I write:

The segregation of our bodies has leavened a stinking segregation of the mind. Words Not Swords can become another salvo in our struggle for equality in body and in language, in desire and in voice. I want to struggle for peace, justice, human rights, with non-violent, non-humiliation strategies and words.

How have women writers, and just plain women, under the veil, in explicit patriarchy-dominant systems, fared? How has beauty, gender, nationality, eros, sex, sexual identity, race, ethnicity, the land, the natural world, urban globs of humanity -- how have they been shaped, kneaded really, under sex segregation -- and racial segregation? And now, increasingly so, citizen/immigrant segregation?

This tome is a must read to have a better grasp of what's at stake in Iran and how we're in the U.S. linked to Iran. From the three hikers, two of which continue languishing in a Tehran prison, to the trauma of their wars against Iraq, the deepening threats of U.S. and Israeli attacks and the endless war in the Middle East that doesn't seem to let up.

Women in Iran have been a force for social transformations at their own speed. Chicanas, Chicanos, Latinos, undocumented migrants, queers, African Americans, Mexicans, Indigenous peoples' struggle to recover their lands -- we share or create similar spaces to those being described and sur-veiled in this new and exciting word venture. Uncannily, here in the U.S. one of the main obstacles we face as writers/organizers/people of color is increasingly less or even racialized freedom of movement: in body and in words. SB-1070 in Arizona, the anti-immigrant, racial profiling law, has made our bodies, our Mexican-Indian-Black-Brown-queer-non-white bodies, the target. Biopolitics at its worst; whenever countries have resorted to bio-politics, they have resorted to war: war on ideas, war on difference, and eventually war on those whose ideas, bodies and differences are the carriers.

The last 160 years worldwide have been the same: upheavals and reorganization, re-combinations of nation-states, who is the People, the chosen race, the master race. This war or struggle over land, resources, labor power, ideas, culture, industrialization leading to atomization and nuclearization, least since 1848, has been a disaster for the world. And the natural world is in upheaval too: the ice cap over the north pole has an opening; one of the largest "wildfires" is raging across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas -- growing by 20,000 acres over night. Restoring humanity to her place in the natural world has been at the center of this major, global shift. Women really will be the determining human force that will shift this battle in our favor, where possibly men with guns (one of the main problems!) will be a thing of the past -- although it will take several generations for this to happen.

So here read this new set of words, Words, Not Swords to sharpen our tongues and our steps for a different world tomorrow. Women of the world, unite! You only have men-chains to lose!

*

This is a preface to a book review to be done later after finishing reading Words, Not Swords; with the caveat and certainty that I will change my thinking and my body in the process.

Chunks | Trozos


I went to the border where
women assemble the world
I saw my cousins laugh
through the poison, bring
home suiches, Magda said.
I make suiches all day. She
brought home the poison
in her veins and passed on
to her husband, his semen
was poisoned too, her womb
poisoned the fetus assembled
at the maquila, born deformed
flowing into the Río Bravo twisting
dumped into her waters
drowning herself. Madga places
her newborn in a barrel cut in
half and sets it afloat on the Rio Bravo disappearing
into the Gulf of Mexico: will this
deformed distorted baby return as
the new Moses

*

The sea
does not
tire
of being
the sea
yet I am tired
of being
me

She dances with
the moon
I dance with her
the moon objects
sends an earthquake
to tap me on the shoulder
cuts in on us
separates us with
a little tsunami.

*

There are tiny apparitions
on my tongue:
Guadalupe | Coatlicue,
soles,
whirlwinds of dust,
tongue-twisting huracanitos,
tempest
shells,
my body
its molecules
dispersed
in equal portions
for every nation
now
and in the future,
my semen,
swimming toward
the impatient sun,
maíz, bultos of
human rights movements,
orchards, her ruby
veins,
the explosion of volcanoes and earthquakes
the DNA of her thoughts and
curvatures,
the hum of bones,
the vibrato of desire

*

We are dilemma:
no one
is
without
ancestors.
You may have lost them
because you lost their way.
When you don't know
where you're from
who your ancestors are
where your bones are buried
where your seed explodes
what season
what time
what color
your past is
it is because you
are both descendant
and ancestor
an elder before your time
you pluck yourself from your ribs
you engender new dust
your bones are sperm for the future.

*
Palabras descalzas
lengua pelada
ojos pelones
corazón zurco abierto
la naturaleza se viste de humana.

*
cada
palabra
es
un acto
una acción
un pensar
un pensa-
miento
con piernas
con sangre
con vida
en movi-
miento
práctica
y practicable:
Ah palabras
benditas
que no son bombas
ni guerras
Abren senderos
en las venas
de tu sonrisa
el horizonte
los zurcos
semilla maciza
viento suave
lluvia madre
agua dulce
sobre la tierra
de mi lengua
lanzadora de reinos

*
Quién me despierta?
Quién me hace soñar?
Tu ternura
tu cuerpo
tus sonidos
(que no hacen ruido)
tus palabras
que derrocan reinos
y lenguajes duros.

*
Ella
estudia
enfermería
medicina
Yo escribo
curandería
hierbas, hojas, semillas
Ella cuida enfermos
Yo infecto imaginaciones

*
Castilla
nos
envió
tres
galetas
llenas de
avaricios
sus velas
esclavizando al viento
para llegar
a nuestro mundo
Yo envío
tres
palabras
a
Europa:
revolución
humana
naturaleza

*
I will make
love
to you
in Baghdad
when the U.S. flees
stops the bombing
ends the occupation
Baghdad will once again
be the cradle of a new
world civilization
with no WMDs
with no occupation
with no torture prisons
with no enemies and no
combatants
The Euphrates will flow free, clean
we will drink form her waters
baptize our love
From Ho CHi Minh City
to New York City
no more America holocaust
will threaten Indians or
immigrants
Tortillas de maíz will be globalized
everyone will aspire to be a
land worker, a tiller of fields
a keeper of seeds
with dirt underneath the fingernails
a mark of humanity
Aztlán will finally accept the sun's sperm
and gestate
the sixth grandfather
the seventh grandmother
when we can become a people again
with a place in the cosmos
in your arms or in mine
all the space we'll ever need.

*
I don't want to leave
any space open to
interpretation
I want
overlapping
mixtures
shared
memories
intersections
conflated
words
collapsing
into
each other
exhaustion
renders
dreams
freedom
we unleash
what
we do not
want to keep to ourselves...

Lucia Veronica Carmona

Vivir entre dos naciones

I

En el trajín de la madrugada,

como todos los días del año

pero cada uno diferente

como diferente es la inspiración,

casi arrancada del sueño

y la tibieza de la almohada,

aún con la memoria de tu piel

en mi boca…

Me levanto en la penumbra

con la idea de cumplir,

el frío me estremece

pero sé que no estoy sola,

en medio de la sombra

desprovista de sol

me acompaña el Lucero

Venus siempre fiel,

en este amanecer de Octubre radiante

cuando el verano se despide, dándole la bienvenida

a la luz del otoño.

Por fin se adivinan

los primeros rayos,

astro rey tan necesario,

compañero apacible y cálido,

que nos despierta su luz,

mientras a la espera

de cruzar el umbral

de la subsistencia

por un dólar más

para comer

para vivir…

II

…Vivir entre dos naciones,

un puente que nos separa

para cruzarlo a diario,

como un río de agua viva incontenible

que se revela a mantenerse quieto,

y quiere romper los cauces

que le ha impuesto el imperio.

Límites imaginarios,

diques construidos por sus miedos.

Ya no ven al río de agua que los nutre

a diario con su fuerza de trabajo,

sudor y sangre que se queda

en sus restaurantes, en los campos de chile,

en sus hoteles cinco-estrellas,

sus letrinas,

sus oficinas

que no quedan quietas.

Tac, tac, tac,

del teclado de una máquina

de escribir anuncia que llegaron,

ya se enciende el neón,

“Yes, we are open”

Ciudadanos de segunda

que cumplen tareas dignamente,

pilares del consumo,

para que no se consuman pronto

en sus contradicciones,

ni se derrumben…

III

Ellos ven un enemigo en cada uno,

ya no confían en miradas inocentes,

ya no pueden encubrir la maldad

esparcida por sus mandos,

desde un pentágono

hacia cinco direcciones,

cinco continentes

que pretenden gobernar,

saben que tienen enemigos a muerte.

Ellos ya no ven al río ni a la gente.

El miedo les señala la verdad,

porque la verdad es que la gente

es como una serpiente,

que a diario entra y sale,

que espera paciente

deslizarse por entre sus trampas,

derrumbando límites

y construyendo nuevos puentes

de unidad entre hermanos

de raza ancestral,

antes separados

hoy vueltos a encontrar.

Despiertan lentamente

caminando juntos,

en un nuevo amanecer,

en medio de la madrugada

y el sueño, sin desayunar.

Es la serpiente de Aztlán

la de la profecía,

la de mil cabezas que se expande

por todo el territorio.

La que avanza desde el Sur

huyendo de sequías y miseria

desafiando discriminación.

Entra y sale para nutrirse

de valor y dignidad de un pueblo,

que tan sólo espera

recuperar lo que es suyo.

La armonía que antes

habitaba en estos

Valles y Desiertos,

la Madre Naturaleza en paz,

sin basura radioactiva,

con agua buena para beber.

Madrugada del 22 de Septiembre 2001

Con espera de 4 horas para cruzar el Puente Córdova Juárez, Chihuahua/El Paso, TX

*

Lucía Veronica Carmona es una organizadora comunitaria por los derechos humanos , poeta y cantautora. Ella es descendiente del pueblo original Raramuris y la hija de una costurera y lavendera. Lucía Veronica trabaja como líder organizadora en el Consejo de Desarrollo de Colonias en la franja fronteriza de Nuevo México y Tejas, donde ha organizado por los derechos del campesino.

arnoldo garcía

pueblo de nubes serpientes

Mi abuelito

contaba

que habían

unas nubes-serpientes

que aparecían en el cielo

y descendían a las lagunas

tocando y levantando mucha agua

y de nuevo las nubes-serpientes ascendían al cielo

donde repartían el agua en lluvias.

Mi viejito

me enseñaba

que las nubes

eran la fuerza más poderosa de la tierra.

¿Por qué?

El era del pueblo de las nubes-serpientes

Arnoldo García
April 10-15

NOTES

Reading poetry: an act of self-determination, self-emancipation

Mini-reviews of
A River Dies of Thirst and Absence Presence by Mahmoud Darwish
A life of reinvention: Malcolm X by Manning Marable

We are all Palestine.

Mahmoud Darwish is one of Palestine's most preeminent poets. Starting out as a national liberation poet, Darwish came under Israeli security surveillance before he was even ten years old. Darwish's writings transformed Paletine's national liberation movement and struggle into a natural human liberation movement, a universal call for humanity wherever she is found and for a place to be Palestinian, for Palestine. Palestine and her people's freedom cause transformed Mahmoud Darwish, from a child-poet to a consciousness, a word-producer, an image instigator, a revolution in human consciousness, to becoming an elder of humanity -- because he spoke out, lived, wrote, imagined, protested, organized in poetry and in action, for the Palestinian cause.

Mahmoud Darwish passed away in 2008 after a heart operation in Texas. Born in 1941, his family and community lived through the "great catastrophe," the "Nakba." His family snuck back into their country and became "present absent," i.e. strangers in their own lands. For a mexicano-chicano with purépecha roots, this is the condition of all Indigenous people -- strangers in our own lands.

The conditions & life of Palestinians parallels that of Indigenous people and so-called "immigrants" (people of color and Indigenous peoples born outside the " U.S.") in the U.S. Undocumented workers and other peoples, derogatorily called "illegals," are "present absent." We have been treated as strangers in our lands. Immigrants, Indigenous peoples and Palestinians, literally, need a world revolution so that we can retake our rightful places on earth.

Darwish writes with a deep passion and multiple senses of beauty and peoplehood. In ten years, in a hundred years, Darwish's oeuvre will be mistaken as testament for the human condition. I fear that given the neo-liberal jaggernaut -- the ongoing attempt to privatize everything: rights, services, air, water, soil, DNA ... -- eventually all workers, people of color, queer, women, Indigenous people and other humans who don't speak English, humans without property, wealth, assets or the right birth certificate or passport will become strangers in their own world: present but not recognized, the illegals of the world.

Mahmoud Darwish writes the life of Palestine and her people's struggles for self-determination and land the life of anyone who has ever experienced displacement, invisibility, dehumanization. How can a "river die of thirst"?

Yet capitalist-drive consumption is driving humanity into the grave as the privatization of air, water, soil -- and even culture, identity, voice, human-ness -- literally dries up rivers and places eco-systems, species and human communities on the endangered and extinct lists.

Darwish draws out many contradictions of the human class and land battles for self-determination and people-hood in "A River Dies of Thirst." Like Absence Presence, his last work, this book of his journal entries is a canto and a letter to humanity, that human survival should not be based or result in the destruction of other humans; that human community cannot be made by destroying other human communities; that the destiny and survival of many nations and peoples across the world is intimately linked to Palestine's survival and return.

"A River Dies of Thirst" like Darwish's "Memory for Forgetfulness" needs to be read and re-read many times. Each time I pick up either of these two books a new insight a new voice a new book new words, new poems appears in his pages. A river dies of thirst, a poet dies for lack of land and his people dispersed across the globe, strangers in their lands, un-human in other countries. How will this story end?

That's the challenge we must take on -- to determine how the story of neoliberalism will end and how our story will begin. In the meantime, read Darwish, then organize and dream for the revolution to be human.

*

We are all Malcolm X.
The subtitle of Manning Marable's Malcolm X biography, A life of reinvention: Malcolm X, fits all our communities. Like Malcolm and because Malcolm is part of our communities, our communities have had to self-transform in the face of crushing exploitation and dispersions. We have had to re-invent ourselves to survive and thrive; yet, we cannot and will not forget who we are, where we came from, how we got here and where we need to go.

Malcolm X was first Malcolm Little, petty criminal, drug pusher and user, who didn't take kindly to work and women. By the time he becomes an adult he is imprisoned. Their he undergoes a spiritual transformation and becomes a member of the Nation of Islam, who eventually becomes the leading voice and messenger of the Honorable Elijah Mohammed -- a phrase he coined for showing respect and follow-ship for Mr. Mohammed -- to someone who is outcast again by the NOI and eventually pays the price with his life. This sounds easy enough, but once you read A life of reinvention: Malcolm X , this was never a foregone conclusion. Malcolm X lived and developed a new way of being principled, austere, ascetic, dedicated to the emancipation of his people. Every community and people has many examples of Malcolm X's in their midst: Emiliano Zapata, Indigenous revolutionary leader of Mexico, who through their vision and work foresaw a different outcome, a different people coming together, to make deep changes and a new history. Zapata like Malcolm X were killed in their prime.

Malcolm X changed because the people, his people, he saw as his base, his leadership, his force change. If Malcolm X had lived to old-age, we would have seen his people include African Americans and all the outcasts, the working class, the under-class, the undocumented, the Indigenous people robbed of their lands, women, LGBTQ. But this is just my speculation, my envisioning of the land he opened up for those who followed to cultivate and till.

Manning presents Malcolm X's chronology as one where in successive periods and turning points, forks in the road, Malcolm X made choices with a self-determined, iron will that makes him stand out. Malcolm became a new man, a new human, as a result of unforeseen ordeals. People of African descent in the U.S. have had to re-invent themselves from slavery to freedom, from racial segregation to racial integration, from underground spiritual struggles to overt organizing from the pulpit, for racial justice and communal liberation to self-determination. The struggle for freedom is also a struggle for identity. All politics -- whether it's Democrats, Republicans, Committees of Correspondence, Tea partiers, Indigenous, Hispanic, Xicano, Black, LGTBQ -- have identity

Malcom X's life and words model the best way to become the change you want to be. I have just begun reading, about 100 pages into the tome (4-12-11) and what comes through is that he was human, specifically a Black man in the U.S. growing up under harsh conditions created by racial segregation and a nascent movements for civil rights and Black self-determination.

Malcom X's story isn't over and keeps getting retold everyday: 60% of all prisoners in the U.S. are African American and Latinos. If Malcolm Little overcame the criminalization and branding and became Malcolm X then all our brothers and sisters can transform themselves too, re-invent themselves and our country, by bringing about new relationships between peoples, genders and classes based on mutuality, justice and human rights."

arnoldo garcía

April 8-9.

My skin

has become

a trend

a battlefield

a war front

each pore

a bomb crater

a bullet wound

a warring cry

in the longest war

for human-ness.

*

Every struggle has to have

her or his own language,

adjectives of freedom

nouns and pseudonyms

of beauty

new words new liberation networks

that link us to the best

utopias and disasters of the past that created

victories and revolutions

our own lives our own suffering

our own labors

our own words

to make us free forever...

*

...

arnoldo garcía

April 7.

palabra-alas

haces habitar

todos mis cuerpos

y tu lengua

el lenguaje

del paraíso

sobre mis sentidos

*

No revolution

repents,

No revolutionary

forgets.

*

inter-indio-net

geopolitics

geopoetics

nepantla or toppenish

Michoacán or Michigan

Purépecha or mexicano

Chicano or Xicana

Latino or hispanic

Hispanic or African

African or Indio

Indian América

indoamaraca

soy nepantlateco

soy de la tierra del medio

la tierra del miedo subyuga mi tierra del medio.

*

Nadie sabe que es una frontera

abierta

es una herida

una revolución

un abrazo

un zipper

un cementerio de la seguridad nacional

el uúnico lugar donde los indios

sob bienvenidos

el reino de la frontera?

No hay lenguaje todavía

para mis pueblos desaparcidos.

*

the snake cloud people

the serpent cloud people

revered the sky

because the sky was home

of their creator, their goddess, their power

their horizon, their land, their laughter

the serpent cloud

the snake cloud

the most powerful force of the natural world

that also threatened or embraced

struck down or gestated

humanity.

I am trying to make you my sky-land too.

arno!do garcía

April 6.

[another excerpt from guerra poemas

from La revolución emplumada]

Anwar Balousha mourns

his five daughters

killed by an Israeli flying an Apache [sic]

helicopter who fired missiles

at a mosque in Jabiliya

Anwar's house was destroyed

by the blasts

Four of his children escaped.

Not

Samar, six years old

Dina, seven years old

Jawaher, eight years old

Akrav, 14

Tahrir, 17

all crushed to death

where they slept

Five missiles

one for each daughter

Five daughters

one for each missile

Five girls

Five centuries

Five Malinches

in the refugee camps

in the migrant camps

Israeli drones in the dark night

looking for their targets

Using infrared television cameras

the Israeli found the five sleeping beauties

five dreaming peace or love

or family or just asleep resting

getting ready for the next day

But how do you get ready

for the next day of bombardments

atrocities. F-16 jet bomber pilots

destroying mosques,

homes, schools, universities,

markets, killing and maiming

Palestinians?

Palestine becomes modern ruins

*

My daily to-do list

1. Build a new country: only humans & the natural world allowed

2. Create, speak a new language, call her: human

3. Be loved & love

4. Accept tenderness

in all her shapes,

forms & powers

5. Organize a

guerrilla, a little war,

of poetry

6. Visit my family,

my neighbors, adopt them.

7. Eradicate sadness, suffering,

abandonment, all inhumane forms of being human.

8. Draw a map of

the desired world,

superimpose the new world over

the known world.

Now throw away the map

of the one that's easier

to live and struggle in.

9. Tag your dreams on walls,

make graffiti in your bed

10. Celebrate, honor your ancestors-to-be

Build altars to them before they die

not after they've been shot, killed, disappeared

and never knew they were living gods

11. Surprise myself,

be happy with my worldly life, dream again and again.

April 5

arnoldo garcía

[excerpt from drafts of guerra poemas in La revolución emplumada]

the comfort zone

where are

the comfort women?

where are the comfort artists?

where are the comfort words

so that soldiers can forget their brutality

to take it out on women

ridicule art

and mangle human tongues

for at least one night

or even just for a few hours?

where is the comfort President tonight?

Where is the comfort Senator and the comfort Congressman?

will they sleep

with the mutilated widow,

with the traumatized soldier,

wit the wounded in a deep coma,

with the human remains of the soldier?

where is the comfort citizen,

the comfort peace,

so we can vote one more time?

where is the comfort march

so that we can protest one more time

the comfort war

so that we can bring democracy and freedom

wherever our bombs explode

wherever our armies occupy?

where is

my comfort woman

my comfort man

my comfortable war?

Send them comfort-bombs

comfort-occupation

comfort mercenaries

U.S. kills day and night

and you expect comfort in the end

*

The U.S. War:

World War I

World War II

the Cold War

the Korean

the Vietnam

the Dominican

the Cuban

the Panamá

the Grenada

the Haitian

the Nicaraguan

the El Salvador

the Narco

the Bosnian

the Afghanistan

the Sudanese

the Israeli

the Palestinian

the Iraq

the Iranian

the Afghanistan

the Mexico border

the Libya

the U.S. war....

*

when will I live

in an ordinary

country

no wars

no invasion

no fly-zone

not even a threat

no drive-bys

no hunger

no greed

to drive us

to coercion

to veiled

and unveiled

violence

no armed men

no hating men

no sexual harassment

no demonstrations

or marches

other than to show poetry

display art and affection

when will I wake up

this ordinary

my ordinary

country

disarmed

not disabled by violence

differently placed

in the kingdom of laughter

an ordinary country?

arnoldo garcía

broadcasting scribbles from my notebooks

April 4

freedom sounds

my music

is noise

was satanic

to the wooden crossed ears of the conquistadores

One people's language is another's

cultural maelstorm

a tempest of terrorisms

Our gods incomprehensible

worthy of being toppled

yet they still built their religions,

their highways, their vacation spots

on ours.

One people's music is

noise to the oppressor.

Our freedom sounds

are an upside down world

to those who hold the keys to the chains

Our freedom sounds

are an offering to the ears and tongues

to hear each other voices

to sing, to holler, to cry

to live for a cause or a song

Noise, our noise, deafens the greedy one's counting games

Our voices, my voice, our words, our music

cannot be erased, cannot be silenced, cannot be dubbed over,

cannot will not be left on the cutting room floor.

Someone hears us, we memorize our sounds of freedom, of land

On paper I leave an ink trail

a path of scribbles for others

to think and go forward

beyond where my bones will finally

rest as scaffolding

In the wind, my voice is a trail

of particles and waves which ride on the moon's machete

or course down crooked migrant smiles.

The voices of our ancestors

as well as our destroyers

still fight it out in the cosmic waves

the quarks of liberation

continue pounding on our skin, our eyes, our sweat,

our voices.

Eventually we'll all get it right. Harmonic convergence

harmony & sickle, harmonic dissent, harmonic uprisings,

harmonic organizations, harmonic community, harmonic equality,

harmonic democracy, harmonic borders,

harmonic languages

where everything means the same in any language, almost anywhere,

harmonic conservation (leave the rainforest and the rainpeople alone)

don't leave home until you're free

Harmonic bones, harmonic DNA, harmonic genome project,

harmonic jimi hendrixes,

the harmonic restoration of

guadalupe|coatlicue

crazy horse

manuela

paha sapa (leave the earth's power alone!)

ana mae aquash

7,000 migrants' bones

five million braceros

50 million russians

two million rwandans, bosnians

all the disappeared indians of the world,

every ecosystem, every species, every man woman child elders youth worked to death, slaughtered by progress and economic development

harmonic liberation convergence...

*

Funny how I can write that

memory does not reside

in machines, computers, bytes, bits,

or even history books. Memory

resides, lives in

memory herself

on flesh, on skin, on bones, on skulls, in the dust, in the water, in the air, in the soil,

in the vibrations of my throat, tongue, lungs, in the way we create the sounds of words,

on how we generate waves across the air to vibrate against your ears or eyes or finger-tips, on our fingernails and hands

just as our ancestors reside growing all the time in our hair...

*

transmusic

transmission

transgender

translingual

transpose

trancegnder

trancemusis

trancelate

trancepose

trancenational

trancehuman

trancefusion

tranceplant

trancejazz

trancelucid

transsmile

trancemission

trancesister

trancerevolutions

translands

trancegress

trancegressor

trancelocated

tanceplanted

transperm

trancegestate

transtongue

trancelung

transdance

trancerhythm

tranceborder

tranceblood

trancecultural

translocura

transtorno

transgest

transgod

transword

transtongue

translanguage

transborders

trancecolors

transcribbles

transeyes

transvision

translaughter

transbound

tranceband

tranceport

transkin

transspace

transblues

transgods

tranceshell

trancesex

tranceorgasm

transart

transulpture

trancepoetry

trancehuman

trans-

trance

trancescribbles

transas

transgarabateos

trancegenic

trancestorms

transhuracán

transehumano

trancenature

transnaturaleza

*

En el reino

de tus abrazos

la utopía

de tus labios, tus besos

una dictadura

de la ternura

la comuna

de tu sonrisa

tus palabras

anidándose en mis oídos

la liberación

tu voz

una cobija

para mis sentidos

todo

en

el reino

de

tus abrazos

*

from time to time

remember the wounds

remember the agony

of being abandoned

when you smile

laugh

or

roll around

in pleasure

remember

it was not always

like this.

*

my memory

is

a small creature

tiny hands

playing

with a collective toy

of cousins

a small meeting

to study

revolution

a piece of paper

with a few lines of poetry

an endless field

we have to clean of weeds,

my grandmother cooking.

making tortillas

my memory

has

no history

no chronicle

unknown by all

except me my family

laughter

food

work

dreams

burials

weddings

baptisms

laughter

crying

mourning

food

remembering everything everyone

migrant camps

indian reservations

canals

fields

planting

thinning

harvesting

winters

no theories

just drumming,

music,

dances spinning in communal circles.

Someone dies we come together

Someone is born we come together

Someone falls in love we come together

Someone falls out of love we come together

Someone reaches a birthday we come together

Someone cooks food we come together

Someone dreams we come together

My memory

is

a small creature

a baby

we breast feed all our lives...

arnoldo garcía

April 3 [transmitiendo desde mis cuadernos de garabateos]

I have stopped
fighting my English
garbling my Spanish
denouncing the Aztecs
ignoring my Purépecha tongue
on which war rages
and rage cries unbroken.

I am a polygamist
faithful to all my languages
married to all my words
in any language in any land
on any body
on every trembling tongue

My people invented french kissing
we stuck our tongue in your mouths
so that you could taste and desire every dictionary
lust after translators
interpreters
of the same dream
in so many dusts
in so many mouths
our lips the shock troops
our desire to subjugate your tongues, verbs unsheathed bayonets
and your body will follow
and your imagination hobbled
speak in liberation tongues but don't mumble
vomit doves and poison syllables

I speak out, denounce and debate against myself
I am split in three and my tongue binds my wounds
my tongue heals my bones and laps up the water from your body
my tongue drills endlessly into your ears
wawanko on the shell of your being
a human vibe to turn you against yourself that garbles our ways
mimics and makes a mockery
of the root of a different world sound

*

Yo hablo a través de cuerpos
mi lenguaje es un cuerpo
que anda, maronea, sufre
y padece
enfermedades y visiones
que la envejecen y la rejuvenecen

Tu cuerpo es mi ventana
Tu cuerpo es mi lenguaje
cristalino de sudores
Tu cuerpo odisea y utopía

La guerra es el cuerpo de mis
lágrimas y rabia, el puño
que florece contra ráfagas
que gruñen sus colmillas
canta y minimiza el vocabulario
de la paz y la cultura del no.

*

no necesito guardaespaldas
necesito guardalenguajes
necesito guardavoces
necesito tu cuerpo
para que me cargues
a donde vayas o estés
quiero gestar en ti
nacer nuevo entre tu cuerpo
ser un nido de palabras
ametralladoras
que con sus ráfagas
hacen los cuerpos correr
lenguaje sobre la historia
gacelas ligeras silvestres
quiero más
tengo muchos temas
como cuerpos multitudes
de garabateos que tienen miedo
no puedo decirlo ni escribirlo todo
por eso necesito tu cuerpo
convertirnos en móviles
bibliotecas y espectáculos
donde bailan los que somos
los que decimos y hacemos
todo porque somos obreras
campesinas trabajadoras
pueblos indios
es decir multitud
que no tiene nada que decirle
a este mundo
porque en este mundo
somos invisibles
somos la creación
que nos habita

*

[1992]

Poética sin policías

What would culture, poetry become
if we didn't have to worry about the police?
What would you and I be like
if we never had to worry or think about the police, La migra,
unemployment, homelessness, poverty, illness,
any of the other problems
that only exist
on this side of the planet
on this side of the line
on this side of the language, the skin, the tracks, the pollution
the politics? without corporate
power, corporate jails, corporate copyright, corporate control of the airwaves, digital bandwidth, original colors and paper?
To not worry about the police
might be an art all its own.

*

Our freedom has been hibernating long.
Their winter is long
They confuse the seasons with our hope.
Five-hundred years of patience
of wintering hibernation
will overcome hypernation
DNA will topple DSL
Our languages scramble their signals
Unscramble their prisons
open doors and closed hearts

*

qué es la historia de mi poesía?
hablo español
invento inglés
vivo en el campao
trabajo en las labores
pisco algodón, hago bultitos de algodón
pisco fesas, manazanas, uvas, peras
albericoques, cerezas, durazno
frambuesas, papas, frijol verde, mucho
descuate, espárrago, menta, mucha menta
mostaza, zanahorias, tomates
lo hago todo
al lado de mi abuelito y abuelita
aprendo a trabajar sain quejarme
escucho sus palabras, su ejemplo
vivo a sus lados
crezco a sus ladso
entre toda la música:
hay tríos, coros de iglesia, mariachis,
corridos, canciones revolucionarias y del movimiento chicano, hay calmecac
hay bailes, conjuntos, orquestras, rock n roll,
blues, jazz y todos los tríos
invento sueños y sueño descalzo
donde las plantas son olas verdes de mares verdes
donde los zurcos son montañas polvorientas
y mi lengua florece en
palabras descalzas
lengua pelada
ojos pelones
corazón remolino de polvo
la naturaleza se viste de humana
y nos viste de naturaleza

*

cada
palabra
es
un acto
una acción
un pensar
un pensa-
miento
con piernas
con vida
en movi-
miento
préactica
y practicable:
Ah palabra
bendita
que no es bomba
ni guerra
abre senderos
en las venas
de tu sonrisa
el horizonte
los zurcos
semilla maciza
viento suave
agua dulce
sobre la tierra
de mi lengua
lanzadora de reinos y utopías

...