The living blues

I don't celebrate my dead
My dead celebrate me
My dead have a hard time being dead
(Just like sometimes I have a hard time being alive)
My dead love being alive
My living abhor death
Life banishes death
Death accepts life
My dead and living love each other
A clacking embrace of skeletal desires
We each practice sleeping without breathing
We each practice breathing without sleeping
We each practice holding each other
We lie and live in a bed of blues
The skin of dreams is black
Our words are our memory of the first kiss
Our lips glazed with blue rouge offering an eternal kiss
I honor my dead by staying alive beyond my means
I carry my dead
in my love,
in my hair,
in my eyes,
in the palms of my blood
I am my dead
I am alive through them
My dead sway in the maize stalks
My dead roll around in the dust and the rain and the mud
My dead flirt, fool around, make fun of the living, they say:
You haven't lived until you've died!

*

The Sonora desert

is the endless dust

of migrants

dead

of stars

banging out

of the walls of deception

Devotion

is the longest walk, the longest memory

of humanity

a milk way of blood and bleached skulls

to arrive in your prickly arms

Our dead

just want to get home

Our living

just want to become dirt again

What men think it strange and crazy

that our bodies feed verdant fields of dirt?

What men carry guns

to herd us into the rows?

What men have lost

their bearings

their roots

wearing nothing but our soil?

A migrant child wails into the stars

A migrant woman places her mouth over the land

A migrant man, made of soils, waters and winds

pauses
before becoming another plant in the sun ...

Writing the veins | Where do stories come from

My ink is the web of life, a sunburned heart, thirty kilometers of veins, holding up the calcinated skeleton of migrants. I scribble from the tips of my fingers to the octopus buds that nestle under my tongue the stories and struggles, singing from the bed of each night.

I do not leave a moment unscribed, I cannot, it is impossible. Every molecule, every second, every gesture, every brushing up against her voice in my ear, is a story, a journaling of shadows.

I am not transcribing reality.

I am inscribing reality with the blood of my grandfathers and grandmothers. They will not be forgotten -- by you or me.

Every breath is a syllable, every heartbeat and step a wording of nomads crisscrossing the blank page. Our words matter because our lives make them inevitable, powerful, a story that you will turn to.

The human cry, the human, is movement. I along with you emerged from the entrails of the mud. Our peoples made thirteen flights from the caves with wings made of dust. Each time we molted, leaving behind an albino sun, we learned to crawl on the belly of our dreams.

Every story is a fluttering in our stomachs as our eyes take in the horizons. It doesn't matter where we started, every step, every where we stand, everyone is on a journey. Our tongue slices heaven in equal portions and everyone has a place under the constellations of our story, our word.

Our stories keep our lust, our future, alive. I listen for your crickets, your humming song, your body springing out of mine.

2

She ripped out your ribs to carve the skies of our long walk on the stone walls of the first night. Then she invited us to dip our fingers in your body, your blood became our first story trembling on the palm of our soul.

Ever since, each one of us rises to bury you to mark the path of memory. Your ribs became cavern and ladder connecting ancestors and ancestors-to-come, a temple for our obsidian tongue, lacerating tiny, translucent flesh offerings from our eyes.

She comes back every fifty-two years seeking the lover who will impregnate her with the milky way. Whose voice could cast a net into the cosmos to grab the spirals of tumbling stars and gasps, the orgasm of the sixth sun? Whose body will swallow the cloudy light and couple with her to keep the land spinning the web of life? Whose hands will caress, then squeeze, her breasts, her mouth, ignoring the menstruating rivers and accompany her to the wintering bends of her hips?

3

My family, my people, were the first skyscrapers. We would elevate our bodies, raise our hands, grazing the palms of our souls against the heavens and strike down constellations and chaos. The milky way gestated in our hands, becoming canyon and topography, tenderness and fist, grimace and contractions.

We became skyscrapers after her. She pushed each one of us out of her womb, giving us wings and sky, soil and wounds, giving us no alternative than movement.

The soles of our feet became calloused ants, our tongues the banners of her seasons, clinging to her body with the rhythms of oceanic waves.

4

The past can be changed only by returning with the rivers to the root of our sorrows.

My great-grandfather's great-grandfather's great-grandmother knew how to carefully cut their wrists to fill the sun with light and bend space with their bare hands. Their word would twist and braid the waters into the land, where we were already buried. The rivers would scrape us out of the grave of our desolation, grinding our bones into snow, ice, glaciers to slow the sun.

The rivers pulverized the songs of our ribs. Then all that was left of my grandmothers' and grandfathers' instructions the intuition of rains and cloudy serpents.

I ingest my grandmother and grandfather: water, wind, soil, maize and the rapids of the hummingbird beating deep under their breasts. I am their son and ancestor, their endless trek zigzagging across my tongue.

In the end, they are the river carrying us to the past and to the future, the fresh wound of love. The river splits the atom, disperses our kisses, the labia that unfolds her body and ours.

5

The crickets hum, hum, hum becoming the heartbeat of the night.

The night hums, hums, hums, becoming the heartbeat of the sky.

The sky thun-ders, hums, thun-ders, hums, becoming the heartbeat of the people.

The people hum, hum, hum, syncopate with the chanting crickets, becoming the heartbeat of the insects.

The insects drone, hum, vibrate, becoming the heartbeat of the ants.

The ants tap, improvise, scribble an endless line, becoming the heart of the soil.

The soil turns, rots, impregnates the seeds, gestates becoming the heart of the rain.

The rain patters, throbs, drums, becoming the heartbeat of the mud.

The mud oozes, seeps, putrefies, becoming the heartbeat of my ancestors.

My ancestors sway, fidget, trudge, wander, becoming the heartbeat of our first kiss.

Our first kiss never ends, I suck on your tongue, your lips, our saliva commingles, becoming the heartbeat of our ancestors and descendants....

[Excerpts from La revolución emplumada]

c|s

I wake up in a new body

Arnoldo García (bowing to the spontaneity of the dreaming movement):

I wake up with a new body.

My tattoos are gone, not even a scratch from my horrendous bicycle racing accident. Freddie and I were racing around the house. He decided to change directions because I was beating him. His laughter betrayed his loss in a simple kid’s race. Then around the corner, boom! Head on collision. He went flying and I went flying over our locked handlebars. A spoke from his rear wheel that sprung out in the crash gashed my left cheekbone.

My eye went black. The red was a sign that something was broken or at least ripped.

In one night, my violent past became past. No fingerprints, no chains, handcuffs, no prison depressing solitudes. I almost cried. I looked at my body, tender again.

I could fly again. I could walk into a store and not be followed. I could say hello and smile at the white girls. I could smile with the black and brown girls. And they would turn their bodies toward me, beckoning, lifting their skirts or lowering their blouses in a secret signal.

My lips were no longer blue. My stomach a plains, flatlands, inviting touch, inviting endless embrace.

I was monolingual. Spoke English only. Thoughts were almost a hissing radio, whose antenna was bent, broken, lost in a digital world. The tongue was plainer, rejected the old spices, the old needs to sing and blow kisses at the delight of strange foods. Chocolate sauces, dripping over chicken? Not anymore. Chocolate shakes, yes. Green chiles cut and diced into the beans? Neither was in my monolingual vocabulary or pastas, salads and burgers. My body rejected thoughts that bad tildes and double l’s, double RR’s and vowels that were stoic, unchanging.

In jeans or in a business suit, I was the man that rejected me, put false gods and obstacles in my way. I was the man that said I was mediocre and too ambitious and should be satisfied with my station in the valley.

I became the man who had cheated my grandfathers out of their lands. I became the man who harassed my sisters, my mothers, my aunts. Yes, my body was lustworthy and even these women I despised were attracted to me. But I only did what I did to them to keep them in their place and insult their men. I had their men under my boots and their women in my pants, my slim waist, taunt, taunting.

In my new body, I was what I never wished to be and now had no choice.

I fit in. I passed because I didn’t have to pass any more. I could apply for jobs that before had always been off limits. I could enter the neighborhoods and no one would call the police on me. I could do with my new body what my old body would have landed me in police custody just for entering the wrong, read white, part of town.

White is white. Brown is brown. Skin is not kin. White man over all. If I doubted myself, I was doing them a favor. If I didn’t push hard, I would be falling all over their twisted shadows, mistaking holes for steps, stumbling for achieving heights, smiles for smirks. My new body was both freedom and imprisonment. I was free to do to others as I felt free to do. I knew what would happen to this body, open to drugs, suburbs, long commutes, failed marriages, childless, growing old and being taken care of by my old body. Would they, the old me’s, really take care of me when all this time I made sure to take every advantage of them to put them down, to make them pay thrice over for something that had no value?

My new body was my new fear of decay. My new body was my horizon filled with the sunset glow of carbon monoxide. My new body was no better than my old body. I was possessed by the anxiety of becoming a victim of robbery or homicide. My new body had access to more guns than a terrorist threat. My new body had access to vacations, getaways, women, food, cars, desserts, services, trust funds, cash, credit, assets, land, houses.

You name it. My new body was the old one that in my previous body I had organized against, had protested, had carried hunger strikes, picket lines — anything to embarrass the new body. Even some of my older bodies had organized guerrilla armies, little wars of liberation, bodies barely able to put down their words and feelings into manifestos. But they were old bodies that knew that the new body would only emerge from their old bodies through a big struggle. Many would die, many of the old bodies. And if I was able to, many of the new bodies of the new type.

I emerged from the old body a new mummy. I emerged rotting already. I only knew this because I still had the DNA memory of the old body, the body that was old because of the those bodies that were parasites with PhDs and nukes, prisons and police at their disposal.

My new body was naked, red under the sun, pink under the artificial light of photoshop. My new body was new only to those who were stuck in the same body as the new me. My new body was an old decrepit German that stole my grandfather’s land and knowledge of seeds to become rich and impoverished us. My old body spoke the language of the moist, fertile soil. My new body spoke the language of the banks and debtor’s prisons. My old body spoke the language of bees, seasons and guttural winds that carried ancestral dusts and rivers to the edge of glaciers and sunken cities. My new body spoke of progress and prostitutes. My new body could buy anything except its dignity. Everything had a price in the new body. Everyone had a name, a story and love in the old body.

My new body beat my old body not just into shape. My new body pistol-whipped, enslaved, branded, forced labor, stole even the sweetness of my perspiration to sell it back to me as the aroma of peasant memories. My new body was my old master, my old slave-driver, my old tormentor that drive me off my lands and out of my mind. My new body was only new to those who were not like my old body. My old body, hunchbacked, honeyed, bronzed, was the topography of tenderness after a 18 hour workday. My old body was the rush of the harvest season and the slow cooking pot of winter beans and steaming coffee. My new body was 24/7 neon lights, two weeks here, two weeks there, coitus on the clock, routines, 2000 hour work years. My new body was the precise mathematics of interest rates and retirement funds, sex and disposable laughter, good only for the buck and the bang of the moment. Nothing lasts in the new body as long as the wallet doesn’t get fat.

The new body killed the old body in a war for possession. The new body was born sick with the sickness of private property in land, in men and women, in children for a childless future, in housing, in health, in air, water and soil. The new body owns or wants to own everyone and everything. Everything and everyone is for sale or else worthless.

The new body makes people fail. The new body is the only human that exists. Everyone else is on a shelf at the mall, waiting to be purchased or leased to be owned.

The new body — everyone wants one. Everyone wants to touch me. I am the holy water of the faithful who have no vision, no will, no ideas and parrot even my mistakes. My new body makes the old body believe that God has failed them or that they need to bow even further down into the deepest and raunchiest of prayer. The new body owns the holy words; they are available for rent by soul.

My new body is already embalmed, laid out in designer suits and with aged champagnes waiting to be uncorked in the bubble of delight. The new body is already DOA. Kept alive by the old bodies, the people who still smell of roots and manured soils, whose ancestors were carried by ants out of our mass grave and the ruins of our temples.

My new body is split in three:
The man who has nothing except threats and bank accounts
The man who loves no one and confuses the lover with an armored truck
The man who behaves as if the old bodies and the women must bathe and adore him so that each night aging results in casting off more old bodies.

The new body sleeps in the old me. The old body suffocates and convulses at the sight of the new skin. The new body has no pores, glistening in the air conditioned limelight that only money makes believe. The new body flays the old body, prays through my skull, screeches into my throat, masturbates over the pigment of the old body.

The new body is trembles at the darkness at the ends of his fists. No rage here. Politicians, philosophers, physicists, police, senators, soldiers, generals, warships, submarines, drones, voters, do his bidding. The new body sleeps soundly; someone else gets to worry for him someone else loses their job and future if he fails. The new body is perfect for destroying civilizations and rendering the natural world inhabitable. Not for him but for the old bodies. The new body has a slim nose, oxygen tanks, swimming pools and DNA patents to stay fresh.

I woke up this morning in this new body that craves silk and fresh milk. I woke up crazy.

#iwakeupinanewbody

All photographs by Arnoldo García, from the Katrina series, 2005.

c|s

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...

From somewhere in East Oakland, imagining a different community of communities

Arnoldo Garcia

Blinded by Color, Unbound by Place: Trayvon Martin

Dedicated to my children and our future together

To the youth, the boys and girls in my neighborhood struggling to live and to their present together.

We must defend ourselves, you and me, from whiteness, white supremacy.

George Zimmerman was Latino? Was Zimmerman a white Hispanic? No. Zimmerman is a Hispanic/Latino mask with a white soul. There are no such humans, Latino, white. (There are Hispanics, but he isn’t one.) Additionally, there are few if any Latino or Brown on Black killings. This is another subject we have to talk about, when our Mexican youth hurt and kill other Mexican youth, when our African American youth hurt and kill other African American youth. Where is the outrage, the breaking of windows, the marches, the call for responsibility and safety, the disarming of the violence when Norteño kills Sureño? Black on Black, Brown on Brown violence is also police violence. Where do the guns and ammo come from, who licenses the arms and weapons that flood our communities, who regulates and distributes the guns, rifles, the violence and coercion that make our neighborhoods unsafe?

The Zimmerman murder of Trayvon Martin was a racist murder, a white violence that is terrorizing us all, a white supremacy that has hundreds of years of violent practice in violent subjugation and genocide and prisons and schools and the mentalities that permit them. Whiteness is not an illusion; it is very real and yet it is a delusion.

We are all very specific, concrete people. If you consider yourself white and antiracist, you are still part of the racist problem. If you consider yourself Latino and are antiracist you are still part of the racist problem. I feel troubled when I hear partner activists, who are progressive and still say they are white. Whiteness must be berated and negated, not the people who claim that identity. We have to separate the whites from the whiteness and that will take some real work. Whiteness has caused and continues causing harm and trauma to our communities of colors. Whiteness is a bipolar world, i.e. insanity with state power and institutions that make us believe, coerces us, imprisons us in cages or classrooms, that whiteness is the ultimate form of humanness.

White is a color, not a culture, not a people. The same goes for black. Black is a color, not a culture, not a people. White, black, brown, these are the identities of racialization, homogenization, which are the function and power of colonization, empire and imperialism over our consciousness and communities, the destruction of our very being and powers.

I am not oblivious (or too ignorant either) of the historical nature of these identities. To destroy and dismantle whiteness, it is not enough for us to call ourselves people of color, Black, Brown. Whites have to stop calling themselves whites and take responsibility for the legacy they have lived and are living under, the privilege of racialized empire-building and the American dream.

Black is beautiful. So is white beautiful? Brown is beautiful. Are those the only colors of the rainbow and the natural world that are beautiful? Is beauty in the gaze of the beholder? Is beauty a racial justice struggle like demanding justice for Trayvon? If Zimmerman is Latino, does that change the nature of the murder he committed against Trayvon Martin? Or must he be white, as I am arguing, for the nature of the killing to change?

What the verdict does not change and can never change is that a white man killed a Black, African American teenager. This story will never change. This is the story that we must change.

So many questions; so much rage and so little time to answer all of them. And Trayvon Martin and hundreds of other African America and Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Honduran, Purepecha, Mixtec, Zapotec, et. al., are still dead from police violence or zombies in perpetual prison or endless criminalization.

We are not minorities either. Minority is a political project of colonialism and then U.S. imperial designs. A minority is a person, a place and a people who lack self-determination and vision – which are imposed by the so-called “majority.” The U.S. plans the future of all peoples and that future is for them to become minorities. (Note: if we count all whites the way whites count us in the Census, whites would be the minorities: 5% German there, 5% Irish there [I know, I know, Irish are not white, but who’s counting?], 5% Anglos here, 5% French, 3% Scottish, 15% Indio or Mexican – boom!)

We are not undocumented. We have enough documents to proof our history and existence that goes back at least 15,000 years. We just do not have the documents that prove we are a minority that knows its place in the uni-polarized world of the U.S. That is the purvey of immigration authority: you are not here and you do not exist until we say who you are and that you exist to serve us, disposable, deportable, guest worker, bracero, immigrant.

I am not a Latino. I am a Mexican. And even then I am a very specific type of Mexican, descended from Palestinian and Purepecha black and indio roots.

In the struggle for liberation and clarity in revolutionary transformations and reforms, civil rights and human rights and neo-liberalism, I have been dubbed Mexican, white, Mexican-American, Mexican American, Chicano, Hispanic, Latino, Brown (another color of racialization, etc.). Now we have the choice of Hispanic. Oh, I am not nor ever will be from Hispania.

In another country in the Americas, for example, you can buy your whiteness, literally, without changing your color. You have money, you buy a document that declares you white.

You can do the same thing in the U.S. You can get your whiteness in the U.S. in one of two ways: With money and with identity (or both). What we are called, what we call ourselves, is the struggle for a new type of self-determination and liberty.

First strategy: Get rich (or die trying?) – or at least become part of the stable working class, i.e. middle class. And you buy your way into the gated communities or at least afford to live in the gentrified neighborhoods or districts where at least 12-15% of the residents are white. Violá – you are not white but you have bought the trappings of safety and wellbeing that whites enjoy without even a second thought about how they got this way.

How do you know you live in a gentrified neighborhood or district? Call the police for assistance and see how long it takes them to arrive or if they even show up.

The second way to buy whiteness is through identity.

Call yourself Hispanic, Latino. Poof you are white. Hispanic, Latino means: “Hey, you can’t deport me! I pay taxes; I work legitimately. I am not ‘Black.’ I am hard working, tax-paying family man. I am not a criminal!”

Agree to forget your history and your past and delude yourself into thinking that you are not the color of your dark skin, that you are not from here, and no one else will notice because you say who you are and you live in the right neighborhood.

And both of these and other ways are delusional. You are not white, you are black. You are not Hispanic, you are Mexican.

You are not Mexican, you are an Indio, an Indian who has been here longer than anyone else who is NOT Indio.

Your are not middle class, you are not rich; you are hand-to-mouth, paycheck to paycheck working class bum, filled with anxiety and worry that you will become unemployed, unemployable, homeless and black or worse end up in the barrio or ghetto.

I am not a Hispanic. Note: There are Hispanics, people who are from Spain or descended from Spanish who settle her in colonies and made colonization a way of life; who spoke Castilian, the language of the castle-imperial kings/queens. There is a 350+year old Hispanic community that settled and continues living in a region straddled by New Mexico and Colorado in the U.S. southwest. The royal academy of the Spanish language has studied this Hispanic region for years because 15^th or 16th century Spanish is still spoken there.

Hispanic is also a synonym for whiteness; Hispanics are from Europe, hence white. To erase Indios and Mexicans from the U.S., sometime in the 1960s and 1970s, the state power decided to count us Hispanic. Poof, you’re gone.

When dark-skinned Mexicans want to delude themselves, they say they are Hispanics, when they are indigenous and have been here longer than anyone else, free or slave, black or white, European, Asian, African.

Hispanic is a very recent creation, a tool of subordination, domination and soul crushing destruction of people. The Hispanics themselves, Spaniards, Spanish, created this identity to crush the indigenous peoples of what is now Spain: Basques, etc.

I am not an American in the U.S. “American” as an identity in the U.S. has been confiscated, expropriated, corroded and made unusable for everyone except whites. In my world, América is a continent not a country.

American is a synonym for whiteness and Americans barely tolerate anyone else using it. In their imperial, neocolonial kindness, whites are doing to us what they did to themselves. By changing their names, they gave themselves the authority to take whatever they wanted, all for short-term gain and long-term, continual disaster upon the world’s peoples and the natural world herself.

In the end, none of this is important if we do not stand up for Trayvon Martin and hundreds, maybe tens of thousands of other victims of racist violence. More critical, can we prevent this from happening again? Will you befriend, mentor all the Trayvon Martins of my neighborhood or are you afraid of Black and Brown Buffalo youth, boys and girls, men and women, hooded and unhooded, middle class or homeless?

I do not want to see another movie of our tragedies made. Why didn’t anyone make a movie of Oscar Grant when he was alive? Why didn’t we care nationally or even locally about Trayvon before he became Trayvon? What about Zimmerman? He is still the killer and will be for all time. Will he find redemption? How does he continue living with blood on his hands? How does the U.S. continue functioning with so much war, blood, injustices and suffering at home and abroad? Will we prevent another Zimmerman from appearing? Will I throw myself in front of the bullets meant for my Trayvon, will you?

*

P.S. we must talk, all of us of all the colors and pigments. We must talk to say who we are, where we are at and where we are going. We can exist without this world, we can thrive as communities in a different relationship. The U.S. formation is not the only world possible. Our language, our vocabularies, our self-determined beings, our relationships can change to make good our lives; we all want to be in a better relationship than the ones that permitted the emergence of Zimmermans and the criminalization of the Trayvons and the violence and coercion that codified it. We are the ones who can make this possible by being different and sometimes just by being who we are supposed to be.

Notes, Oakland, July 14, 2013.

the noise of the noiseless

I am the noise of the noiseless

I am the sex of the sexless

I am the orgasm of the orgasmless

I am the leg of the legless

I am the god of the godless

I am the mouth of the mouthless

I am the nose of the noseless

I am the eye of the eyeless

the blind of the blindless

the heart of the heartless

the seed of the seedless

the son of the sonless

the love of the loveless

O I am the voice of the voiceless (more or less)

the tonsil of the tonsilless

the silly of the silliest

the path of the pathless

the apathy of the apathyless

O I am the aim of the aimless

the scorn of the scornless

I am the land of the landless

I am the migrant of the migrantless
I am the ink of the inkless
the paper of the paperless
the documented of the documentedless
the undocumented of the undocumentedless
the illegal of the illegalless
the human of the inhumanless
the male of the maleless
the man of the manless
the erect of the erectless
the secret army of the proletarian armyless
the mess of the messless
the shadow of the unshadowed
the punk of the punkless
the shit of the shitless
the wit of the witless
the brains of the brainless
the more of the less
the more or less-less
I am the hope of the hopeless
the care of the careless
the cruelity of the cruel-less
the top of the topless
the bottom of the bottomless pit
i am the stink of the stinkless
the skunk of the skunkless
the music of the musicless
the mute of the muteless
the karma of the karmaless
the caramel of the appleless
I am the passion of the passionless
the hatred of the hateless
I am the body of the bodiless
hear me well, more or less, voiceless
for I am the sign of the signless
the deaf of the deafless
the dog of the dogless
I am the tattoo for the tattooless
I am the skin of the skinless
the nudity of the nudeless
the breast upon which of the breastless suckle
the lips of the lipless
the hip of the hipsterless
the style of the stylishless
the unpublished of the unpublishedness
the queer of the straightless
the long-play of the shortstopless
the grand slam of the hungerless
the lust of the lustless
the kiss of death of the lipless
the laughter of the laughless
the happiness of the sadless
the fucked up one of the unfucked ones
the hipster with double hip replacementless
the admonisher of the admonishless
the hand of the handless
O I am more or less human
more or less understood
more or less loveable
more or less
given an lifeless or two
I am the weeroh of the grasshoppers counting the heat of the sun's rhythms
I am the voice of the suffocating dreamless
I am the body entering the bodyless
I am the possession of the dispossessed
I am the tenderness of the hardenedless
I am the contradiction of the dictionless
I am the field, the hoe, the migrant, the whore, the shore, the mostless
I am the holy of the holyless
I am the sacred of the profaneless
the sin of the sinless
the hell of the hell-less
the purgatory of the constipatedless
I am the color of the colorblindness
the healer of the healless
the shoe of the shoeless
the scar across the back of the spineless
I am the cacophony of the cacophonyless
the cacao of the chocolateless
the poetry of the poetless
the saliva of the drymouthedness
I am the spit of the spitless
the smile of the sweet revengeless
I am the humanfan, unfolding,
the crack of the crackless
the drug of your manic choiceless
the vice of the viceless
the voice of the choiceless
the coitus of the handless
the leper of the leopardless
the assassin of the unassailableless
the bullet of the clueless
the shadow of the sunless
the wrinkle in time of the timeless
the space of the spaceless
the nectar of the flowerless
the loneliness of the solitudeless
I am O I am
the nothing of the nothingness
the synthesis of antithesis
the anti-matter of the matter-of-fact-less
the chingon of the chingonless
the puta of the putaless
the horn of africa for the buffaloless
the aztlan of your landless desire for land
the spontaneity of the masses for the massless
the community of the lostless
the soul of the soulless
the thought of the thoughtless
the vile of the vileless
the war of the warless
the peace of the peaceless
the weapon of the unarmedless
the word of the wordless
the voice of the viciousless
the viciousness of the speakerless
the democracy of the democratless
the notes of the noteless
the compost of the dungless
the fire of the fireless
I am O I am forever walking for the walkless
I am the job of the jobless
I am the revolution for the revolutionless
I am the justice for the injustless
I am the vision of the sightless
I am the rotting teeth of the teethless
I am the almighty for the mightyless
I am a world traveller for the localless
I am the commonest manifesto for the manifestoless
I am the listener for those who are never listened to the earless
the glue for the glueless
I am O I am the center for the centerless
I am the ballet for the clubfootedless
I am the drunk for the teetotalerless
the dictator of the dictatorshipless
I am the spoiled fruit of the fruitless
I am the soiled of the soiledless
I am the alibi of the guiltyless
the sorcerer of the witchless
the baying of the bitchless
the sixth sun of the sunless
the distant thunder of the rainless
the traitor of the complacentless
the missive of the illiterateless
the missile of the armyless
the doomsday of the presidential bunkerless
I am the cost of bad schooling and good mannerismsless,
I am a curandera of the healthless
I am the inexhaustible panting of the pantless
the butt of the jokeless
the glass eye of the glassless
I am the rage of your voicelessness
I am by all accounts a ventriloquist of the woodenless
I am a stand-up communist of the proletarian revolutionary punchline of march
a noise among the noisyness
a nose among the nosyness
The nooses for the counterrevolutionaries
I am the representation of the representationless
the loss of the lossless
more or less...

*

poem & painting by arnoldo garcía
"El poets," 25"x22" (2011, mixed media)