A New Poem!

To be sampled this Thursday at Spit Dat (1351 U Street- Capoira Center- 8pm). Written for final performance of Capturing Fire 2 the week of August 22.

God or Something Like Her

I don’t pretend to be close to God
But there are certain times when prayers rock me golden
Like yellow beats
Move me like trees swaying in the DC fall
as the branches bare themselves

I am naked
in these moments
Exposed to the most of my soul
And the breath of my skin
heavy with goose bumps and weakness.

“Is God in there?”
I ask in this seconds before sleep comes
When the harmony of voices has sped out of my universe
And I’m left wondering if that was a religious experience

or just a poor man’s version of soul

I toss in sleep
With nightmares of gravity
And the clouds hanging above my slumber
haunt me like grey ghosts.

I wake to the applause of my insides
slow like necessity
I don’t know how to keep this fresh
How to take the down tempo beats blasting
And have them bring me to a higher being

Like lost cities or childhood
I am just trying to bring me back to civilized.
To God or something like her.

Rock me with your lyrics
Dream me into infinity 1000 times over
If I wasn’t so afraid of death I would have done this by now

Sink into the reservoir of blues, greens, spirituality
Beautiful like rain pounding the humid city

on an August day

Like renewal
Like understanding real and not distance
Like lifelong strangers asking if you need a hug

No bitch, I need a voice
I am mute with hallucinogens
Can you stomach that?
Your prayers can’t make my blood thicker or richer
But it can make me feel whole again
like orange peels or the West Coast
Like long drives or phone calls that end with I Love Yous

Something about this feels real
Like love, ache, breaking, body

I move with the beats, rhythm
Feel the spirit of the music in my veins, bones
I am just working on understanding the lyrics.

Gowri K and Sarah L feature at Sparkle! Wed 9pm!

Gowri K and I will be featuring (performing 4-5 poems each) at Sparkle, a queer-friendly reading for all, at Busboys and Poets on 5th and K at 9pm on Wednesday July 22 at 9pm.

Hosted by Danielle E. Come enjoy/support/ listen/ read on the open mic. $3 gets you in.

Come support us in both of our first features!
More info.

Exquisite Corpse II

Another corpse, courtesy of Evan C.
There is a beat in the
back of my neck
That tells my limbs when to dance
Tells my eyes when to glance
And guides my legs as they leap.
I want to learn to skip again
Float like my child brain and
Bones remember how to fly
And lips recall the lie
That held our bodies down
Pinned down like necessity
Before our muscles told us to move more
After we layed and splayed and run our bodies sore
Before, before, before
We were ever born.

Lately

Lately
I read the emergency procedures as I
ride the red line to Dupont
Pluck heroes from the crowd and sit closest to them
Breath anxiety in and out of my lungs while

Talya is coming out of her coma in Mumbai
They say she looks like Natalie Portman’s shaved head now
and that reminds me of Seattle

But I’m back in DC
Worried about voltage
About the inertia running a river like lava under our seats
I pound music in my temples to occupy the space there as

Talya’s temples
brain
crack
skull
fracture
As Eastern antidotes ease her into coma
And I hope she doesn’t sleep long enough
For her parents to
have two special needs kids now.

I don’t know how to breathe in the world anymore
Lately the heaviness of humidity is an elephant in my lungs
And there is injustice and lost souls and
zombies inhabiting grown men’s bodies and
celebrity corpses
fucking
everywhere

And I breathe

Wonder about the people I will keep closest
If they will really only stab me in the front
Or if they come up cold like carcasses from the gravel
I worry about what I can’t see in my periphery

And I think I need to have sex.
Emergency sex
Saturday afternoon with no roommates or formalities sex
And I can’t sleep.

My eyelashes flutter to the beat of a broken commute
And the burial shrouds that crowd the space
where their breath used to be
Lately I’m thinking about the screech of metal
Taking folks to heaven instead of home.
I’m dreaming of Talya’s post week long nap and
Sleep filled eyes waking to hospital lights
bright with confusion
As her shaky hands touch the cracked cactus
where her foot long curls used to be

Lately
We are all trains bound and gagged for glory
On tracks tangled and demented by time
We are all just surviving this
All just bracing for impact
It’s up to no one to tell us how to breathe right again
So we exist on empty lungs and diesel filled skulls
Convinced we are headed to purgatory or worse
Convinced that we can learn to breathe underwater
Convinced our ignition is lit by burning emotion
And not funeral pyres.

And we breathe.

Because lately in our bones
that’s the only thing we all seem to know
for certain how to do.