Cuba 2010

If perfection is grace, than here in this land I have found this space. When clouds appear, they never stay for long. The sky may open up to release rain, but the rain is unlike any I have ever felt before. It renews you, it is warm and full of love and life. Just like the people I have met here in Cuba, each day I spend here feels kind and inspirational. Waking up to look outside the window to the glow of the magnificent sun, watching the palm trees dance and fresh coconuts hang from the limbs of their hearts. This is a state of constant great, for if you are here you can't help but smile at the marvel of Mother Nature's creationism and Father Oceans limitlessness of maintaining life. I wish all Westerners could experience a moment of time here, for I think it would make magnetic, frivolous worries disappear. Everything is more beautiful than the capture of  words or the snap of a picture- you can't smell the air this way, nor feel the mist of a tropical rain fall om the surface of your skin. If the sky is grey, the warmness of the people and their personality distract any feelings of grumpiness and charge a patience and promise that soon enough the sun will return to smile on the land. The rhythm of the music inspires smiles all around, the motioning of hips swaying from side-to-side resembles watching a penny circle around a well. This alive paradise is where you can find natures perfection, peace and inherent happiness through the way that life is lived each day. Thank you for the memories, forever they will stay.

3 Lastest in Xtra

Hello friends!

I have forgotten to post my latest pieces in Xtra, so here they are! The article on comedian Shawn Hitchins came out today. Enjoy!

1.  Shawn Hitchins is a Single White Douche
2. Embracing 20 years of ASAAP
3. LemonTree's Still Life

Camera Obscura

I have a glow because I believe you can save me. I think that you were sent to me, and I am open to welcome your influence on me. Hazy, inhale me and smoke me like a sizzling joint. Let my lips burn the tips of you fingertips as I whisper love and you see that I am swallowed by you to be a fleshy peach. Push between your thighs, open the magic door to heat.

To have me, to hold me, I have never loved you more. I bask at the site of knowing that you love me too. When you look at me you really see who I am.

Like a picture that stands still, as the camera flashes the frame. Every time I think of beauty I see your name, each time I exhale my breath I feel you move me through me - my veins, my blood, my ebbs and my flows. With you by my side I am present and it is a gift.

Never go away, I love you.

Queen of Hearts

Love is a most interesting energy. It seems the more often we allow love into our lives with surrender, the more powerful it grows as a source of power and enlightenment in our lives.

If you would have asked me after my first break-up if I knew what love was, I would have said yes. The break-up pain I experienced, I remember as if it were yesterday - I felt like an injured soldier waiting in the trenches for death to come and take her away.

In retrospect, I now realize that as wisdom grows with age, so does our capacity to love. The more we are shown love in kindness, the more we can love others. When we are mature and experienced enough to really understand the commitment and work it takes to make a partnership last, all of a sudden we come to terms with understanding that love does not work within the realm of control.

Instead, love is gentle and free, she may come and she may go. She can be wicked and she can be a source of nutrition for your soul. Through it all one thing remains true: after we really can value love for what it is - a devotion towards caring for someone other than ourselves, a commitment to ride through the rough patches and always gain the strength to reach the sky again. Feeling each breath fill and circulate in the width of our chests, we can never be the same again.

Love be a lady tonight.

Coming of Age

Money is a funny thing, it seems the quicker it comes, the quicker it is spent. I grew up in a very middle-class household and I often watched my parents struggle to pay the rent. I'm sure that if it was not for my mom's uncompromising work ethic, we could have easily fallen behind the fence of poverty margins. I am not going to be dishonest; I saw many tears and fears from my mom over the years. Often I heard arguments around how she solely was going to support the family when my dad became a victim of mental illness on one hand, but also selfishly decided to stop being a productive member of society and providing for his family. For many years I resented him, he was cruel and watched her work so hard with little regard besides a grumble of what was for dinner when she got home. Not forgetting the abuse of tongue that spat at her more often than not from his venom.

Last week my mom retired. I don't know how this makes me feel- it is so complicated. On one hand I'm so happy that she finally gets to relax after years of being the glue that kept our family afloat. She especially kept and continues to keep my dad cared for even in his most abusive periods of self and others. Beyond this sentiment I also feel fear, as the constant reminder falls with the coming of her retirement of aging and ailment in the form of a bad knee she's developed after being on her feet for 8 hours a day for the past 20 plus years.

At work I get calls from her already saying that she is bored and that she worries of spoiling and becoming old now that she's retired. She refuses to become still and pushes herself to even take small walks daily.

This is the first time I have heard her express complete fear of aging. I can't help but have my stomach sink a little and my eyes fill with tears. For all the years of worrying she did about me, about us, I now worry about her. I wish to protect her like I always have, but now I also want to be a rock for her like she was and continues to be for me each day.

I urge you not to take your parents for granted, to help them in any way you can. Any small gesture counts from a phone call to sending them some cash if they are in need.

I know I won't forget my moms care and to care for her today, tomorrow and the next day. She more than deserves it.

Float

I don't seem to sink well. It seems I am better made to float back to the top. Mentality is a choice and we all have a choice to chose how we feel. What hinders us as people is the interference of things outside ourselves, unless we are self-obsessed (in which I can't help your soul either way).

In one split moment it fell on me that it I needed to steal back my time and it's time to take control.

I'm back again.

Self-Massacre

Michelangelo, "la furia" (The Fury)

Who have I become? I am not the person I envisioned myself to be at this point in the game. How come I feel more sad than I have in a longtime? Why can't anyone properly pronounce my name? I moved forward in good faith, my heart tucked away as my compass and my good intentions as the beacon I thought to highlight my way - but it seems that I have not really come too far at all.

Lately I have been feeling like a failure, not someone I am proud to call a carnation of me. My mind feels stagnant, I am frustrated that I have yet to finish my degree and pursue the passion I have for history as a career path that is meant to be. Historical sexuality brings such out-pour from me.

This feeling sinks in my circuitry and it resembles a momento from the past that I never wanted to see again; helplessness without the focus to regain concentration and get back on the train.

I don't feel excited when I see my writings published anymore, I am not sure if I am really helping anyone with my thoughts afterall. I am not usually like this, I am compromised, vulnerable and in a weaken state. I feel embarrassed that I can't just shake it off and move away from the confusion and the pain.

A hit of a wooden bamboo stick across the side of my head. I lay in the gutter and what sinks into me is  falling away. I look in the mirror and I am sure that something has gone wrong. I push my loved ones away for when I am like this I want to be alone in my misery without impacting those around me.

I swear I am not usually like this, maybe all the pressure, disappointments and routine to work only to pay is making me fade away.

Route 29

29 times around the track and somehow she had managed to keep her breath, for the most part.
29 rounds she had danced around the ring avoiding most blows, but sometimes being impacted by a hit and hiding the bruises that lurked below the surface of her skin.
29 times she had held her heart in her hands and asked mercifully why it hurt so much to love.
29 times she had healed with her unfaltering faith that aligned with her everlasting faith in love.
She imagined how she, the little girl that had become a young woman would be when she was 29 -  the only sentiment that she sang was a feeling of protection and pride for her little young lady.
It was close to the 29th that she has found the gray ball of fur that would become her first born responsibility to understand affection beyond human capacities.
29 times she had asked for help when her own senses became deaf to seeing what it is that she really saw and felt, each 29 times her family and friends had pulled her through.
29 jobs she had tried, some she has liked other she came to dread, yet somehow she still found a shoe that fit her petite flat foot.
All 29 years she saw the beauty and then pain, flushed out the miserable and tried to regain honesty in training herself to be that which moved away from the pain.
For 29 minutes she looked in the mirror and felt fat.
29 tracks around the lap and now she was looking back.
In the constellations she sought guidance as to what the next 29 laps bring, or would there even be 29 more before extinction became evident and her body became dust?
29 years she had seen the strongest, bravest and kindest woman in her mothers eyes.
Where did she have left to go, nobody knows but 29 had gone by, she knew this for sure.