10 Rulez

Her star spangled banner body is waiting for you to bring home her supper;

The taste of brown boys is rusting her throat.

She wants to feed on the color she could never get from colonizing the heavens,

She only drinks when she needs to filter your tongue,

from thinking too loudly

She wants to share you with all her friends at the gun range,

Don’t be whiplashed.

Don’t be whipped.

Participate.

Rule 1: exist.

Rule 2: breathe quietly enough to swallow your ancestors

Rule 3: loosen your body, nobody wants a brown boy to fight for himself

Rule 4: blink twice if you’re free  

Rule 5: don’t be yourself; it’s disrespectful to live past 18 if your skin isn’t snow white, willing to swallow forbidden fruit.

Rule 6: don’t be loud enough to die; being shot is America’s form of poetry, don’t you wanna be published?

Rule 7: should you find your worth, speakeasy, for only you can smile with your teeth shattering to the rhythm of your spine. Pick crops from her field before you end up being picked from it.

Rule 8: drink more water. it’ll help your family from drowning in el Rio Grande, you know the one they had to swim through for freedom

Rule 9: when you hit land, run. before you end up in it

Rule 10: don’t turn your neck unless willing to have it snapped; pray for yourself before you are someone’s reason to pray.

Continued: Lucifer

Battle boys are meant for war

Your brittle bones aren’t buoyant enough to survive heaven

Sometimes my lungs get too heavy to hold my breath,

I’ve asked him,

aren’t you glad I found you in my throat,

singing harmonies down my spine.

He tells me,

this is what healing feels like

burning alive.

I’m from the south of your tongue,

North of your skin,

I stripped my dignity in the 6th grade when I became to “heterosexual” to look myself in the mirror

I’ve been practicing how to tighten my rope,

Sexuality isn’t something we share in your house,

I’m becoming an expert at your craft.

Good boys sit in their closets,

they learn to play beneath the bible scriptures they were never included in.

I make melodies out of men like you

Who question the holiness of their own church

I listen to you lie to yourself,

Are you afraid that your tongue will slip

from your teeth

like the men you’ve made confessions out of

Talk to me

without shedding your skin after every question

I’ve learned from you

that snakes get nervous under pressure

Are you ready to attack again

How many times have you swallowed your tongue trying to fit in America:

Hip Hop by: Francisco Velazquez

There's a method to our madness.

How we make music from our roots,

We were taught to dance to keep our ancestors alive,

Hip hop has kept us alive.

There are revolutions in our bodies

waiting to happen,

How we've made hip hop our leader,

There is more struggle in our music

than our mouths;

We've learned to speak with the sounds of our cities,

We've learned to cry on the symphony of our streets,

Hip hop is this moment.

Hip hop is the space we fill when racism overpowers our suffrage.

Hip hop is more than the media makes us,

We make our music from the marches we are still in,

From the dead bodies we still claim.

How many lynchings does it take to unscrew a nation,

How many bullets does it take for justice to be served,

Mike Brown looks like us,

Like brown bodies aren't meant to see light,

God made us brown to attract the sun we are.

We are still fighting a war

that was passed on 15th Amendment,

We have been instructed to take the blood and body of Congress

and cross our tongue,

That we are too foreign

for any branch that has made our judicial body

a Sunday news story,

We are too full of roots

for any branch to make our limbs

their legislative decision,

We are too full of culture

to be lost in the executive home

of a broken country,

Hip-Hop is our freedom song.

As long as we have hip-hop we are free to speak on issues that jury would otherwise rule us guilty,

If you listen to us closely,

you can hear our breathing beneath the bass, 

It's why we're still alive.

Is your church holy enough to fix its own sins

Woman by: Francisco Velazquez

You asked for man

with lips like oceans and tongue like anchor

Son of Holy

and you’d hope he’d find his trinity in you,

He wanted to baptize you

with no church but the scriptures of his hands.

He found your saint

in the shape of your neck,

He found your Virgin Mary

in the limbs of your crucifixion

His lips only knew the shape of beer bottles,

His soul only knew the shape of skirts.

He played tennis with your lips,

hoping he’d start a new game of LOVE ALL.

The bruises on the side of your thighs speak.

They are begging for your voice

to rid the exorcism that he has made of you.

He has left your bed,

But you still sleep on the floor,

Never return to the scene of the crime.

There is caution tape in the truth,

of your mouth.

Blood is plastered in-between the Wonder Woman covers he gave you

He made a woman out of your wonder,

He made a coma out of your living.

He picked your flower

for the nectar that is his devil.

You cant raise an angel in hell.

He’s repeatedly tried pulling your roots

into the filth that he has come from,

He wants to be your mother nature

without the responsibilities of the child that could be his.

He raped your Middle East and expects to build his Jerusalem in the broken of your body.

He said he loved you

He said he loved your hands

on his 6ft of monster.

He said he loved the texture of your scream

and the silicone of his stem in your country.

He said the rosary of your body

was meant to be tucked in-between his legs,

He wanted to break you like Pangea

and expect your continent to be discovered by the Christopher Columbus of his giant

He climbed the bean-stock of your spine and broke the branches.

Love was never meant for emergency rooms,

Men were never meant to lay with girls,

Skirts were never an invitation

Rape is not consensual.

It still isn’t.

He is not innocent and the only person that sleeps behind bars is the abortion of the child that lays with you at night,

He pushed you down two flights of miscarriage,

The baby shower ballons are still hanging on the crib of the he or she

that will never have their first day of kindergarten.

The piece of you that was meant to be born turned to casket that was never planned,

You see him or her or them…but never together,

Their tombstone is empty,

What can you write for something that never lived?

Their will never be a scream at 3AM in the morning,

Because the man that loved you destroyed the only innocent thing in this date rape that he calls love

His two-faced Gemini is one side of Priest

and one side of the broken Trojan condom that was never used,

He raped your Holy in his own house,

He raped your holy in his church,

He played guardian

when the only person watching was God.

He still preaches to a church that has never seen your face since the day your confessional turned into his enlightening,

He said he loved you

for making a Bible out of his sins.

After Attempted Self-Destruction Part 2:

he left you alone; right now you are alone; put him down before you take yourself out; friendships aren’t built on the bases of broken bridges; your ribs holding all his skeleton, before he breaks into you; he doesn’t want to break into you; stop feeding me lies; I’m sitting right next to you, wishing you’d stop cutting yourself out of this world; don’t be afraid of taking yourself home, to yourself; I’m tired of telling you what you know; stop closing your lips to kiss the feet of a friend that isn’t willing to move mountains for you; you need to stop building an empire from the rocks he’s destroyed you with; he won’t strip his mouth of his chains; he won’t swallow his heart for yours; now you sit; bleeding all the love he hasn’t given to you; think to yourself, are you living right now as you bleed next to this sink; put your razor down for him; not to rid yourself of him, but to stand against him; have you made love to your worth before losing it in others; I don’t think you realize the empty spaces you fill with your presence; you lie here, leaking from your insides, the death of your broken best friend; your body is a bible belt of suffocation; stop letting him win; beat him at his own game; love yourself, first, before he can; every day you sit in your mouth brain, addicted to the way he doesn’t think of you but only thinks for you; you are addicted to him; his warmth, all the drug you need to overdose on; you churched your body, held his bones, built a home within the drowning baptisms of his lost lovers; he loves her, not you; your soul is a basket garden of lost lenguas; funerals have turned into your favorite holidays; eulogies remind you that dying will make you human; you killed yourself again today, thinking of him; this is your cycle of light; you spend your time, living and dying for this man; you told him to spend his time, feasting in your lungs; your teeth, more courage than the bark in his bite; teach him your ways: wash, rinse, repeat; wash your body without scrubbing your worth off too hard; rinse your demons from living in the sins of your memories; repeat this until you are holy enough to stand in the mirror with the lights on, without cutting yourself; your best friend holds you by your tongue, running his fingers down your arms; now you sit, with a razor in your hand, debating whether you’re worthy of being enough or eulogy.

After Attempted Self-Destruction Part 1:

You once lived too close to the sun you sought in others; you are in-between death and life; will you walk into the light that you can’t find; stop, searching for yourself in the broken pieces of your best friend; you aren’t dead, but this can’t be living either; your best friend can’t love you if you’re dead; so you keep breathing until it becomes too much to handle; you describe your bond so dark you only seek him when you can’t exist with yourself; you met him, but he never seemed to have met you; your eyes, looking in his moon, howling for the stars in his throat, tell him to stop leaving you for himself; I’m sorry you don’t believe in life at first sight; it’s okay to spell yourself in ink; I understand existing can be too much at times; this blood looks like a painting you’ve been preparing for; waiting for him won’t make him sign your skin with his eyes; he doesn’t realize his mouth can carry so many sins, but you love him; I understand drowning yourself in his oceans will feel like home, but he is not all your Earth; your home, so full of his death, his cologne waiting to intoxicate your shoulders, stop lifting his teeth; his bite, will make you damp; his hands will only bruise you without touching you; I can relate to this moment of black; your skin is so fascinating to metal, the way you make symphonies with your veins; you are so inviting; don’t question why he made you his home, your breath keeps his spine from breaking; now, in this water that you are drowning in do you find your peace; stop, cutting yourself, so short; you can’t be a legend from within her; mother nature doesn’t want to carry another broken soul; do not plan on loving yourself if you are broken; the desert in you only looks for the saliva of your mouth in others; calm yourself, hold your breath, long enough to remember why you started breathing in the first place; wake up, make your bed without you in it; tuck yourself neatly in the space you fill in this world; remind yourself that today is the day; today is the day you love, yourself, first; tomorrow, wash, rinse, repeat; wash your body without scrubbing your worth off too hard; rinse your demons from living in the sins of your memories; repeat this until you are holy enough to stand in the mirror with the lights on; 

07/21/15

(work in progress)

Dear Lucifer,

I won’t commit suicide today.

I won’t tighten my rope for you,

Good boys sit with their tongue still enough to silence their sexuality

I’d rather snap my fingers too gay than snap my neck

My shorts will be longer than my life span

I refuse to make my birthday the day I sang too loudly to find my way out of a coffin

There are steps to living with you,

I’ve tried them before

1. Tell yourself that today is the day you don’t slip under the knife

it’s okay that surgery can’t fix you,

can you count the times you’ve tried drowning yourself alive

the bath tub just isn’t deep enough

2. Cook what you set on the grill, Lucifer won’t burn you too hard if you ask nicely
   bite your tongue, sometimes that’s the only meat your mouth should swallow

3. Stop being flexible enough to be bent. No one likes a boy that can bend his spine as easily as his morals.
4. Men aren’t supposed to be seen without their throats; make sure to leave your dignity at home where you left him
5. Repeat your name in a graveyard, repeat your name in a graveyard, repeat your name in a graveyard, third time’s the charm
6. Stand in 6 feet of water, practice holding your breath, it might come in handy
7. Give God a sign, he left you the rainbow but sometimes colors get misconstrued  
8. Do wait to be born still; no one likes waiting in line for a broken toy
9. Hide and go seek forgiveness; the church won’t teach how to be enough for yourself but swallowing the body of another man is forgiveness, apparently
10. Hang with yourself. 6 feet under.

I won't waste today wondering what could have been tomorrow. 

I will make the best of Wisconsin,

to grow

in myself 

in my art

It's a new beginning.