My Poetry Blog

[picture taken outside, @ my family's laundry room] 🛌🏽 [CW: dissociation] 🍳 “Who am I?” Traveling to México in July cracked me open like eggshells before scrambled breakfast & tortillas. A blend of diasporic trauma & ancestral healing. It was sleepless nights from paranoia & an unfamiliar bed, bawling my eyes out from deprivation & dissociation, and being immersed in a completely new environment. •👥• It was the shadow work I didn’t know I needed. To realize how I let communal expectations mold my reality. To tighten my hold on my voice and stand firm in my boundaries. No more sleeplessness and hallucinations. No more silencing myself to feel comfortable in my blood-curdling pain. My resting days of hanging out with cousins at home were vital to me feeling at peace. •💔• Pretty pictures can conceal so much. Like how your sleep-deprived self can hallucinate: half of your body staying up all night beside your strange bed while in sleep paralysis. How it slowly rocked in a fetus position, mind broken into a state of shock. Trauma is not invisible. It ruptures brain cells, muscle, bone, and entire psyches. But I’m not here to colonize my experience as sacrilege. I am divinity itself, I am the body of God. I grew into myself in so many ways that “holy” could never count... •🗣️ • { In just ONE WEEK, I’ll be heading to Baltimore for the Stonewall International Poetry Slam with @sipsfest ! If you resonate with my storytelling & poetry, I invite you to financially support me as a donor or Patron and see behind the veil of my creative growth - music, creativity prompts and much more! [ linktr.ee/dogdaysareover ] I’ve been preparing to put my all into my performance & ensure my experience connects me with those aligned with my message of self-love, healing, acceptance, and abundant growth. Thank you all for your support. } • 🛐• ⛪ I crawled out of the cathedral of Catholicism long ago, and I’m learning to rebuild this structure of self-silencing. Cathedrals tend to face the sun as it rises with people praying towards light. When the rays finally reached my closed eyelids, I began to unwind the poison in my bones. It ached like a million swords piercing my marrow all at once. I couldn’t bear to feel so trapped in my mind that all I wanted was to rest for days at a time. I had to sanctify my entire being to stitch the edges of my split psyche back into place. A broken mosaic of stained glass, shattering into a masterpiece. 🌱Despite my family’s expectations, I ate an abundance of plant-based meals that nourished my body and soul. My aunt’s pambazos (bread fried in red sauce & stuffed with potatoes & mole) quite literally saved my mental health from breaking further amidst a crisis. In Oaxaca, my uncle’s mom and her relatives cooked me spicy chayote, mole tlayudas, and tomato pasta sopita. We went on a tour where there was a buffet with cabbage, radishes, squash flower soup, corn starch desserts, and huge bean tlayudas. I never went to bed hungry, knowing the crops of my ancestors had my back. 🙏🏽 I’ll never be the same after returning. This story is but one cell in the body of an experience beyond words. Thank you to @merlot_samurai for staying up with me, comforting me, and sharing your own struggles with mental health & sleep. Thank you to my family for feeding & sheltering me, even if they could not understand my entire experience.Thank you to my partner @pkmnbreederbenny for being my shoulder to lean on when I felt like no one around me could hold me together. Thank you to myself for cradling my broken self & continuing to love myself when I felt separate from the colorful festivities surrounding me. ORACULARITY feat. Frankie Tanimal OFFICIAL POETIC MUSIC VIDEO PREMIERE! "REWRITTEN" chapbook out now!

ORACULARITY feat. Frankie Tanimal OFFICIAL POETIC MUSIC VIDEO PREMIERE! I was born at the cusp of revolution. May Day Beltane blossoms of mounted chaos. There is always arson rioting the night before I’m reborn every year. I always smell the smoke the next day, fragrance like clashing fists and lost tongues. When I say my birthday is an apocalypse, I mean it is another veil pierced to uncover sunken mirages. Everything is usually closing or opening near my birthday. Rent, scholarships, documents, quarantine, rebellion, bloodshed, cyclones, earthquakes. When I say my name is a song I do not mean it is always pleasant. I mean its dissonance will reveal the places on my throat where I’ve choked myself most. I pull an everything from my mouth and it collapses into a something. E.g. this poem. E.g. an emerald script. E.g. a pyramid. E.g. the United States. E.g. the White House. E.g. the historical repression of thousands of bodies from their sociocivil rights. E.g. an epitaph. E.g. a funeral speech for every nameless body unwritten by the Bibles of history. E.g. the preacher swallows a gospel and administers xenophobia, administers homophobia, administers fear of anything unlike the something they pulled out of the everything they don’t know about God. I’m always busy on my birthday. When I’m not, the world wants me gazing into a mirror and not a birthday cake. The portals in my forehead resonate too intensely to ignore. For years I thought this a curse of unfulfilled festivities. I think of celebrating the day after. The week after. The month after. The year after. The lifetime after. I’ve stopped grieving what should have been a living body. The planets unalign around my singularity but constellate so anchored within my aquatrenches. I think that is how dead things grieve themselves into living. They take a lifetime and condense it into unfurled candles of warmthed hearths. [3:33am] A mirror in my forehead tells me it is always my birthminute. Being alive is enough to celebrate unabashedly with fermented fruit and soft, iced bread. God pulls everything out of a something and it becomes a preacher sitting in the White House. Preacher epitaphs his own grave until history swallows him unwhole. Thousands of bodies gain the right to preach, but still confined in the pyramid of rewritten Interdependent Declarations. I’ve most choked on my throat in places my dissonance sounded pleasant. It is still a song. A mirage unpierces itself and the smell, of lost fists and clashed tongues, start believing its lies again. There is always smoke the day before arson riots. There is always rebirth the day after my birthday. I was born at the cusp of an everything. Thus, I will die as a rooted monolith of my every something. "REWRITTEN" chapbook out now!

I awake abruptly to hard pouring rain outside my open window. I feel the wet corner of my mattress slightly cool my warm fingertips as I rise from bed. I’ve grown used to these sorts of surprises. I am packing my things for school but I notice the intense warmth and lack of electricity in my room. I look at my phone only at 15% and shut it down out of cautiousness. The bathroom is below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. I step out and return with a thick blue sweater. I have to use the plunger’s wooden end to break the ice layer in the toilet bowl. The sink is frozen shut. I casually open my fridge and it's become a dense, saturated rainforest. All the food has been reverting to the seed it originated from. For breakfast I munch on an apple with peanut butter and oats in almond milk. But the apple that seemed juicy yesterday tastes more unripe than expected. The peanut butter is a lot crunchier. The oats taste raw. The milk tastes a lot more nutty. I pick up the phone and an unknown voice tells me we are all running out of time and then changes his tone to tell me to tell me we have all the time in the world. I call my friend to check in on him and he tells me about how his mint leaves tastes a lot sweeter and younger. I walk outside and the clear sunny day yields a moon and stars. As if the sky had lost its atmosphere. I grow tense. It's cold out here too. I hear the snow falling onto the cars on the freeway. The sky blackens but the burgers in driver’s hands are bleeding water and antibiotics and crops and dark blood. The rich people’s money (which most of the world will never touch) is screaming, silently. I do not know why I know these facts. I just do. Given the dire circumstances at hand, this comes as no surprise. Everyone has an ecosystem forming in their vehicles. The weather is changing behind every closed and open door. My housemate's car had a desert inside of it. I once heard on his car radio the sun is expanding because of all the ways “civilized” humans poison each other and the air we breathe. I board the bus and I'm lucky the temperature resembles a sunny meadow. Of course they wouldn't want plants invading this small public space. I step outside and smog permeates the thick humid air. I have to use a face mask. I do not think of this astronomical doom but I am shocked by the unexpected hurricane in the library bathroom. I couldn't help but write all this as a warning. I can't seem to figure out how to navigate the nerves in my head, always haunted. Always modulated by undertones of environmental destruction. Climate chaos. Will the sky cave in on itself and suffocate us from the fossils we used for fuel? The sun grows faster than is comprehensible but the trees aren't on fire. It feels like 60 degrees outside. Half the sky is raining hard but nothing is getting wet. I'm remembering how the politician on TV says youth are the future for the fate of the planet. He offers his agreeable hope but we want action. His office is a grassy meadow. Everyone else’s drying meadows have been burning before they started growing. The tall trees are half their size here, I've found online images of my hometown, trees almost completely turned into seeds. I can imagine them crunching under my feet as I walk the streets to work. Splitting open and forgotten, never to sprout. I do not listen to the back of my occipital lobe demanding we do something. I do not listen to how the leaves crunch under my feet signify tides of fall season. Its autumnal beauty a stranger to my irises. I do not ask myself why the “civilized” do not recognize this divine being. Pachamama... pachamama... pacha... mama... Mama... mama!!! There's a mother on fire in the streets trying as best she can to cradle her dying baby in her arms. Funny how I don't think about how it’s a dystopian Pietà in reverse. Child unscathed but awaiting for overhead vultures to scavenge the finale of its life. I arrive at the garden I work at and taste the mint leaves. They are in fact sweeter and younger. I take some to put my in my salad I packed for lunch. Our weeds are smaller and our tree branches are turning green. I do not wonder how much time we actually have left. The version of me that does wonder this ponders if the ones most responsible for this will suffer the most. The version of me that does wonder this holds hope in his arms and watches it die in flames. He wonders if he or anyone else he loves is next. He ponders revolution. All these versions of him and more taste the mint. Still, I’m left with a bittersweet aftertaste in my mouth.
"REWRITTEN" Poetry Chapbook Out Now!

1. Masculinity is too often Wildfired explosion entrapped in a body Waiting for oxygen to catalyst the hydrogen bomb It was taught to bro ken into 1. This frac tured truth jaws my gaping wounds. In this bloody intimacy it demands I bewail its name. 1. This breaking beast daggers my every absent vein. Within a murder scene of crows, whispers you can't name me better than I can. 0. Say confidence. Adorn your broken. Ridiculed if you don’t. Say insecurity. Lockbox your eyes from its poison. Roadkill if you don’t. Masculine. Masquerade. Masturbate. Only your kind can speak self-pleasuring so you seem less shattered sand than gilded glass. Mass. Mastodon. Massacre. There's a crumbling cathedral inside your hands. Don't point out its grey stained glass. How the glisten often blinds wordless eyes. And bleeds. Everything does in the end. 1. I say his name just to curse it. Toxic mas to don Venomed mas querade Lethal mas sacre[d] Toxic mas 2. -culinity. To delineate myself from masks or mastodon masquerades that toxify my softening, I must remember; listen to the honeysuckle my mother milked for my infancy. How her pink carnality of boqueted carnations bled fountain upon mounted fountain Til I was sectioned out her womb a lifted lotus. 2. Why does our culture actively colonize, commodify landscapes of body birthing most? I wash the blood of every ancestral brokening, axe away at the walls embedded in my ears, grain by grain. 2. I sing confidence and insecurity in the same melody. I roadkill a lockbox and hear a mask splitting itself open. Bloodless wound. I am both shattered sand and gilded glass I will not apologize for it or my queerness. My mother’s and sister’s lineages have mastodoned themselves down with too many insincere “sorry”s for men that would rip the silence from their throat and violence the baton-passed violent down theirs. 2. I steal back my arteries hidden within a murder scene of crows. my sister and mother held veined daggers hidden under their skin all this time. 2. I bewail blood from my wounds, find a man I can finally love Both another and myself. for even just an unbrokening unmasquerade. 2. I was taught to live as broken hydrogen bomb I should strive to become oxygen in a body that doesn't trap itself In a wildfire of crimson explosion. Can anyone show me, show me what I cannot fathom? Three. "REWRITTEN" Poetry Chapbook Available Now!

Self-Portrait (Pt. I) (Here I am, broken and newly reborn. I’m learning how to be myself amidst a cacophonic peace.) Now, in this sitting moment I'm dancing through hallways of the house in my mind Looking for fluid darkness already flowing inside my own cathedrals My body is not a temple, it is something much more divine; a breathing organism. Divinity my cells hold amount to more than my own soul Do they? Where is the line drawn between who will become more God than what is incomparable? But waves reflecting moonlight remind me I’ve learned enough tonight from moments that do not shine Beauty is really just pain, realphabetized into an etymology of golden ichor blood over fractures, broken into a ghost of the word "perfect" And the same could be said for the house inside my brain I've learned to architecture from dripping dark seething out my pores The moon taught us all She always has Been a reminder, radiance phasing magnificence Just like my every wake and wane and window pane and pain and How everything can become it: - PAIN - The one thing that will destroy so mercilessly it will amnesia your restful Make you forget you can pheonix the atom bomb in your heart Because all I can ever do is wait the moment I will run 3, 2, 1 And GO! As the strings fire, they ice their way in disguise To pass through and Trojan Horse the strings so tightly woven vertically across my face They are unlearning unnecessary tension when all else seems to threaten I can break through I know I can I just need a breaking so graceful you’d think I planned how I’d be reborn, cycle once more Unwind me! I know the mirror can He has my same hands to slowly peel my skin (The same pen as well) The same feet to get back up onto I take myself apart like no lover dreamed they could Undo myself so carefully pieces could be resealed in a single origami-precise sleight of hand like I was telling myself to stay put this entire time in my stagnant wholeness One of the boldest self-surgeries you have ever fucking seen I can love myself back into radiance Back into ease of internal flow Back into remembering, back into loving my otherness to re-become a shred of divine Worship is called back into the prayer As if there were not any divinity before But I remember all the music after the “Amen” All the harmony before “Amen-Ra” lost its sun The sun shone before we ever fucking named it No- [-thing, -where] -name could ever confine me No syllable or lack thereof could ever define me No ocean could ever not remind, and {un...| do (you remember what birthed first?) She. Earth. She is a home from explosions, universe says. When will we learn to silence our own eruptive detonations? Of external, inter-ternal war I’m still outpouring all the explosion in myself... I’m still sitting, dancing in that internal house. Cathedral body pheonixed into moonlit loose strings I observe this new lunar self-alchemy, new potential mosaic quilt of my every internal resynthesis In silence. . . . . . . . . . . How to knit myself and the world back together at the same time? REWRITTEN Chapbook Available Now!