my mom holds her accent like a shotgun
with two good hands
her tongue
all brass knuckle
her hips, are all laughter and wind clap
she speaks a sanchocho of spanish and english,
pushing up and against one another in rapid fire
there is no tellin’ my mama to be “quiet,”
my mama don’t know “quiet”
her voice is one size
better fit all and you best not
tell her to hush, she waited
too many years for her voice to arrive
to be told it needed house-keeping.
english sits in her mouth remixed
so “strawberry” becomes “eh-strawbeddy”
and “cookie” becomes “eh-cookie”
and kitchen, key chain, and chicken
all sound the same.
my mama doesn’t say “yes”
she says, “ah ha”
and suddenly
the sky in her mouth
becomes Hector Lavoe song.
her tongue
can’t lay itself down
flat enough
for the english language.
it got too much hip,
too much bone,
too much conga,
too much cuatro
to two step,
got too many piano keys
in between her teeth
it got too much clave
too much hand clap,
got too much salsa to sit still
it be an anxious child wanting
to make Play-Doh
out of concrete, english
be too neat for
her kind of wonderful
her words spill in conversation
between women whose hands are all they got
sometimes our hands are all we got,
and accents that remind us
that we are still bomba, still plena
say, “wepa!”
and a stranger becomes your hermano,
say, “dale!”
and a crowd becomes a family reunion.
my mama’s tongue is a telegram from her mother
decorated with the coqui’s of el campo,
so even when her lips can barely
stretch themselves around english,
her accent
is a stubborn compass
always pointing her
towards home…
If I should have a daughter, instead of mom, she’s going to call me Point B,
because that way she knows that no matter what happens,
at least she can always find her way to me.
And I am going to paint the Solar Systems on the backs of her hands,
so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say ‘Oh, I know that like the back of my hand’
And she’s going to learn that this life will hit you,
hard,
in the face,
wait for you to get back up, just so it can kick you in the stomach
but getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.
There is hurt, fear that cannot be fixed by band aids or poetry
so the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn’t coming
I’ll make sure she knows she does not have to wear the cape all by herself
because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers,
your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal.
Believe me, I’ve tried
And baby, I’ll tell her, don’t keep your nose up in the air like that
I know that trick, I’ve done it a million times
You’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail
back to a burning house so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire
to see if you can save him.
Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place to see if you can change him
But I know she will anyway, so instead, I’ll always keep an extra supply of chocolate
and rainboots nearby.
Because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix.
Ok, there’s a few heartbreaks that chocolate can’t fix,
but that’s what the rainboots are for because rain will
wash away everything if you let it.
I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass bottomed boat
To look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind
Because that’s the way my mom taught me.
That there’ll be days like this
that there’s be days like this my mama said
When you open your hands to catch, and wind up with only blisters and bruises.
When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly
And the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape
When your boots will fill with rain and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment
and those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you
because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop
kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it is sent away.
You will put the win in winsome … lose some
You will put the star in starting over and over.
And no matter how many landmines erupt in a minute
be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.
And yes, on a scale from one to overtrusting, I am pretty damn naive.
But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar.
It can crumble so easily.
But don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.
Baby, I’ll tell her, remember your mama is a worrier
and your papa is a warrior.
And you’re the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more.
Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things and
always apologize when you’ve done something wrong
but don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining,
your voice is small but don’t ever stop singing.
And when they finally hand you a heartache,
when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street corners
of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that
they
really ought to meet your mother.
Did you know the average person spends 4 years of his life looking down at his cell phone?
Kind of ironic, ain’t it?
How these touch screens can make us lose touch
But it’s no wonder in a world filled with iMacs, iPads and iPhones
So many “i”’s, so many selfies, not enough “us”‘s and “we”’s
See, technology has made us more selfish and separate than ever
‘Cause while it claims to connect us, connection has gotten no better
And let me must express first, Mr. Zuckerberg
Not to be rude, but you should re-classify Facebook to what it is: an anti-social network
‘Cause while we may have big friend lists
So many of us are friendless, all alone
‘Cause friendships are more broken than the screens on our very phones
We sit at home on our computers measuring self-worth by numbers of followers and likes
Ignoring those who actually love us
It seems we’d rather write an angry post than talk to someone who might actually hug us
Am I bugging? You tell me
‘Cause I asked a friend the other day, “Let’s meet up face to face.”
They said, “Alright. What time you wanna Skype?”
I responded with “OMG!”, “SRS?”, and then a bunch of “SMH”‘s
And realized, what about me?
Do I not have the patience to have conversation without abbreviation?
This is the generation of media overstimulation
Chats have been reduced to snaps
The news is 140 characters
Videos are 6 seconds at high speed
And you wonder why ADD is on the rise faster than 4G LTE
But, get a load of this
Studies show the attention span of the average adult today
Is one second lower than that of a goldfish
So if you’re one of the few people or aquatic animals that have yet to click off or close this video, congratulations
Let me finish by saying you do have a choice, yes
But this one, my friends, we cannot auto-correct – we must do it ourselves
Take control or be controlled: make a decision
Me?
No longer do I want to spoil a precious moment by recording it with a phone – I’m just gonna keep them
I don’t wanna take a picture of all my meals anymore – I’m just gonna eat them
I don’t want the new app, the new software, or the new update
And if I wanna post an old photo, who says I have to wait until Thursday?
I’m so tired of performing in the pageantry of vanity
And conforming to this accepted form of digital insanity
Call me crazy, but I imagine a world where we smile when we have low batteries
‘Cause that will mean we’ll be one bar closer…to humanity
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holla boys, Holla boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
And what should we do with him? Burn him!
Ithaka
BY C. P. CAVAFY
TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Before the stepwork and the fretwork,
before the first wet spiral leaves the brush,
before the plucking of the geese’s quills,
before the breaking of a thousand leads,
before the curving limbs and wings
of hounds, cats, and cormorants
knot into letters, before the letters knot
into the Word, Eadfrith ventures from his cell,
reed basket on his arm, past Cuthbert’s grave,
past the stockyard where the calves’ cries bell,
and their blood illuminates the dirt as ink
on vellum, across the glens and woods
to gather woad and lichens, to the shores
to gather shells. The earth, not the cell,
is his scriptorium, where he might see
the interlace of branch and twig and leaf;
how green bleeds brown when fields are plowed;
how green banks blue where grass gives way to sea;
how blue twists into white in swirling lines
purling through the water and the sky.
Before the skinning of a hundred calves,
before the stretching and the scraping of their hides,
before the boiling vinegar, the toasting lead,
the bubbling orpiment and verdigris,
before the glair cracks from the egg,
before the monk perfects his recipe
(egg white, oak-gall, iron salt, mixed
in a tree-stump, some speculate)
to make the pigments glorious to the Lord,
before Eadfrith’s fingers are permanently stained
the colors of his world—crimson, emerald,
cerulean, gold—outside the monastery walls,
in the village, with its brown hounds
spooking yellow cats stalking green-black birds,
on the purple-bitten lips of peasants
his gospel’s corruption already sings forth
in vermilion ink, firebrands on a red calf’s hide—
though he’ll be dead before the Vikings sail,
and two centuries of men and wars
will pass before his successor Aldred
pierces Eadfrith’s text with thorn,
ash, and all the other angled letters
of his gloss. Laced between the lines of Latin,
the vernacular proclaims, in one dull tint,
a second illumination,
of which Eadfrith was not unaware:
this good news is for everyone,
like language, like color, like air.
I don’t remember how it began.
The singing. Judy at the wheel
in the middles of Sentimental Journey.
The side of her face glowing.
Her lips moving. Beyond her shoulder
the little house sliding by.
and Geri. Her frizzy hair
in the wind wing’s breeze, fumbling
with the words. All of us singing
as loud as we can. Off key.
Not even a semblance of harmony.
Driving home in a blue Comet singing I’ll Be Seeing You and Love Is a Rose.
The love songs of war. The war songs
of love. Mixing up verses, eras, words.
Songs from stupid musicals.
Coming in strong on the easy refrains.
Straining our middle-aged voices
trying to reach impossible notes,
reconstruct forgotten phrases.
Cole Porter’s Anything Goes.
Shamelessly la la la-ing
whole sections. Forgetting
the rent, the kids, the men,
the other woman. The sad goodbye.
The whole of children. Forgetting
the lost dog, Polio. The gret planes
pregnant with bombs. Fields
of white headstones. All of it gone
as we struggle to remember
the words. One of us picking up
where the others leave off. Intent
on the song. Forgetting our bodies,
their pitiful limbs, their heaviness.
Nothing but three throats
beating back the world–Laurie’s
radiation treatments. The scars
on Christina’s arms. Kim’s brother.
Molly’s grandfather. Jane’s sister.
Singing to the telephone poles
skimming by. Stoplights
blooming green. The road,
a glassy black river edged
with brilliant gilded weeds. The car
an immense boat cutting the air
into blue angelic plumes. Singing Blue Moon and Paper Moon
and Mack the Knife, and Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.