my birthday falls pretty close toward the beginning of the year, so often times, New Year Resolutions are also I’m Getting Older Resolutions. in no particular order:
a lot has happened the last time I updated. 1st, my dad got in a car accident a few days ago. the vehicle was totaled beyond repair or salvage. but, locally, he came away with just a few cuts. no broken bones, no infection, nothing lodged anywhere.
he did come awfully close though. the cuts on his left ear are pretty deep and the doctors told him he was lucky it didn’t get cut off completely. also, he has a gash above his left eye. a few inches lower and … well. it reminds me of my own childhood; I bashed up my head pretty bad like 2 inches above my eyes. any closer and I would have been blinded.
but, like I said, he’s fine. it happened on Christmas eve, in the morning, and the next night, he was in Hoboken, playing the Wii at my sister’s house. it kind of scared life back into me. 1 of my 1st reactions when he came home from the hospital was to call someone up, anyone, to just not feel alone.
but everything worked out fine. I’m actually really glad it happened on Wednesday and not Tuesday; he had to stand outside on the highway for an hour, waiting for emergency services. Wednesday was 50 degrees warmer than Tuesday.
the week before, I had pretty much back to back culminating events at work. it was a presentation of all the things we accomplished in the fall. back in the summer when I put a culminating event on, I finished off our skit with a palm heel strike through 2 slabs of concrete. it was really easy and it seeded naivety in me. I wanted to out do myself so the other week, I tried a spinning hook kick and an elbow strike. both were techniques well beyond my abilities. I made a fool of myself (though was able to turn it into a never-give-up-always-challenge-yourself-indomitable-spirit-Tenets-of-Tae-Kwon-Do lesson for my kids). I injured myself pretty bad (cut up forearm, heavy bruising and swelling on my hand and heel) and, worse of all, it was captured on tape. I’ll upload the video later.
I finally worked up the nerve to close off some relationships. they were relationships that should have been closed off almost 10 months ago but it took some time. there are a couple of others that I really should do the same with and I’m teetering on the fence.
For my sake, the world was created. (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5)
We found out by accident
that if love is entirely accidental
then the things that follow will also be.
We laid crumpled, defeated by the bodies
we used for language and tried so hard to share –
the borrowed rib, the salt and ashes.
If we were truly primal,
if we were Yahweh’s 1st proof of concept,
we’d know time through our biorhythm,
counting where our skin is thinnest:
the inside wrists, the whale bone jaw.
Our hearts are for more than pressure
and pressed together, you couldn’t help but follow.
We settled on a soft one two, one two,
one two three. The way one forgets
the sound of his own breathing, so too
did we soon forget this beat.
The thunderstorm was just as easy.
I take back what I said a week or so ago. Far Rockaway isn’t the kind of school that Teach For America tells scary stories about.
last Friday was report card day and 1 of my students got a 97.5 GPA, equivalent to A+. his response to all the congratulations wasn’t I tried hard or it was hell or I’m really gunning for this scholarship, but my mom is going to be really proud.
I teach the kid poetry and he takes to it like a fish to water. attendance in my class has been dropping (it’s on a voluntary basis) and I told him it might end up being just me and him. he said, I don’t care if it’s just me, I’ll still fight to keep this group going.
he wants to be a broadcast journalist, not a poet. he won’t even minor in English, just philosophy. but he’s very literate, reads books for fun. and good books, not Michael Crichton shit. I’ve only heard his writing once and there wasn’t much craft in it. still, he loves it.
and I found out he doesn’t even have the highest GPA. the valedictorian is another student of mine.
last Saturday was my 2nd week at the YMCA teaching spoken word. I didn’t get any (exactly 0) students the week before and I got just 1 student this time around. I was making small talk with him:
how long have you been coming to the YMCA?
just 2 weeks.
really? why did you start coming? what activities attracted you?
spoken word.
I was talking to my director and she said he only comes for spoken word. he doesn’t stay for anything else.
I gave him some free writing time and he started writing a novel. he doesn’t have any craft either but he’s very eager. I taught him about showing vs. telling, something so basic but something he really needed.
I think I have prodigies on my hands. if anything, I know that I have an obligation as a teacher to help them grow and develop. I also have an obligation as a poet to turn them into poets. I can’t slack because they look to me, literally. working with the little 1s with Tae Kwon Do, they don’t always show appreciation. for a long time, I had this feeling like I was a wandering teacher, like I taught anybody anything just for a few dollars, without regard to their desires or potential. I’ve since been proved wrong (with the little 1s) and proven even wronger with these poetry kids.
They wanted so hard to fit in
that my parents, like all immigrants from the 1980′s,
got their baby names from the Book of Joshua.
We belong to a loose fraternity of John Doe’s,
Brothers David and Paul and Kevin.
Our only birthmarks came in our last names,
which sometimes don’t contain vowels.
I heard your name spoken aloud
for months before I saw it written down,
like thunder finally outrunning its flash.
I spent nights rearranging letters
and phonemes on graph paper
and my 1st best guess was Cylindra.
I needed a new kind of math
to know the volume of your soul
as it spilled from your mouth in notes and chords.
The Romans used your strength
to hold up their roof of gods
and, in return, made you pretty
but it’s obvious God used more
than just regular polygons to form your figure.
I found my 2nd guess in the gutters,
after the rain, where puddles pretended to be mirrors.
They told me your name was Selendra,
after Selena, the domina luna.
All it took was the slender crescents
buried just beneath your cheeks
to convert me to lunacy.
My grandma saved every penny so once a year
she could buy cakes in the shape of you
as a symbol of our wealth and opulence.
But your eyes are more like the sun,
how they tempt mine to stare dead on
and how they leave ghosts of themselves
burned into my vision.
It was printed on a Christmas card.
The arrangement of letters were a better gift
than the well wishes. Serlindra,
from the Spanish — ser, to be; linda, beautiful.
I’ve never had more faith
in the truth or efficacy of names before now.
I witness the god of words
work through you and am happy.
I see night in a Chinese newspaper.
The writing, all Greek to me,
poses like low flying constellations;
a blanket of matchstick gods playing war.
Crowded and delicate, their arms
never clash but I can feel electricity
in a photo op of men so old
their bodies are dosing tear drops.
They mold monuments from Mahjong tablets
sitting between river deltas of rush hour traffic.
The calligrapher at China Republic Times
sits down every morning
with a latte and a brush,
fat as an upside down comma,
and paints Picasso before lunch.
He comes home to a hissing television
and bedroom walls too tired and dirty
to even tell stories.
He tries not to read the water stains
on the ceiling before he sleeps.
He tries not to see.
I am holding his flip book libretto,
his paper mâché Grecian Urn.
The hero at the start of the page
wears a coat cut from a dragon boat’s kite.
His 2 stroke damsel cries behind
caltrops of crystal shaped characters.
He, and I, feel our way through.
When we were in Mrs. Guthrie’s class
and had to build bridges
using mini marshmallows and toothpicks,
mine always came out looking like
tepees strung up along fault lines.
See, sometimes the Indian girl and I
would reach into the bag at the same time
grazing pinkies as we went for the same piece
and I would always concede,
leaving her with like 20 and me with only 3.
Sometimes I was just hungry
and sometimes I thought it was too funny
not to plug them up my nose and sneeze.
The first time I couldn’t see you
for tofurkey and stuffing
because Mattapan was too far from Waltham
I searched for beautiful on Flickr
hoping to find a picture
of the 2 bumps on your neck
where your spin tried to spell
kiss me here in Braille.
Instead, I got photos of ivy vines and sunrises,
of sea lion pups and some guy’s 2 nieces.
Someone blogged Bridges are beautiful
explaining that cable stays
are the hundred splintered arms
of the Bodhisattva of compassion
who holds up mankind to keep us all from falling.
I responded by calling him a freak.
It was only when my commute crossed Rockaway Pond
that I found the majesty
God or someone built into bridges.
I watched cars drive on the ridges of the waves.
The sun fell between the arches
of the Cross Bay bridge like it was Stone Henge.
It’s harebrained to think
someone once stood on the moon,
someone stood on the tallest mountain,
that someone stood in front of a tank
with nothing more than a shopping bag full of fruit
but no one’s ever stood still on that bridge;
they’ve only ever driven through.
last Saturday, I started my new gig at the YMCA. I was set up to teach in 1 of the conference rooms and on the door was a big sign that read Authorized Personnel Only. I doubled back but then thought, wait, that’s right, I am Authorized Personnel.
and last summer, I ate my lunch in the Teacher’s Lounge. it’s both weird and amusing how all of a sudden people are trusting me into restricted areas. not that they have anything to worry about.
The rhythmed static noise of falling coins
is unmistakable on Bushwick’s streets.
Bums quickly learned that their maraca-cups
could change some dimes and nickels into notes.
(Maracas are the instrument they had
before Nuhmus could spare deerskin for drums.)
The strangers passing by have covered eyes
and voices hidden deep from joining in.
The Viking gods hired a stranger
to build the walls around their homes.
Under the shade of nighttime, his horse
carried stone from the quarry
to the crest of the hill where the stranger worked.
While the day scrolled on and the man
with engineer’s arms leveled loaf upon loaf,
the stallion slept in the shadow of the half completed wall.
Now that he has good work
with full benefits and paid vacations,
my dad spends his days off
sleeping on stacks of phone books.
He says it’s for posture
but I wonder if his muscles miss
the kiss of heat from heavy loads.
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