Hi folks, this is one of Steevi's poems... I guess it was written under duress (skool), but I think it's fucking AWSOME!!! So I'm posting it to try this blogger blog... If you know Steevi, let her know what you think. I love Anarchy! I love San Diego!
My blood is forgotten faded and cold to the touch but burning inside
I am an orphan of murdered culture
I am the daughter of raped dreams
Mutilation in diaspora.
Somehow I always knew that I would never
Feel
American
Which in the end is what my grandmothers sacrificed themselves for.
Which in the end is what they were sacrificed for.
And when I try to trace my way back to that
I’m wading through raging streams of blood. Searching for my sunken roots. Trying to keep my head above what used to be water
Only to be standing eyelid deep in the sudden heavy stillness
Of knowing that I can’t go back and stop them.
The seduction of our captors sickens me
Capitalist and colonies. Candies and condoms
Laced with cages wrapped in packages that say “for the free”
For those who dare to be brave and free. Welcome to your pretty cage
At the cost of your soul. To be wrapped up in bundles and boxes
To be lost and gathering dust amongst the millions of others
Stacked in towering rows of endless bundles and boxes all gathering dust with labels that say “free”.
Can we not understand what we are worth?
Though our histories may be silenced they are woven into our landscapes.
They peek through the bars of our cages like the flower that rises through the cracks in the concrete and mouths the words to us when no one is watching.
Lullabies and riddles with the secrets to our humanities
Inscribed like brail upon the earth
A muse hidden in the strokes of a painting that everyone’s forgotten to try to find.
Tangled amongst the stems of a flowerbed,
she turns hollow echoes into music we pretend we cannot hear
Never realizing we were not alone.
She tries to make warriors out of broken dolls and cigarette butts
She tries to make their laughter her own and
Trampled under toe she teaches herself to dance beneath the rush of the crowd.
Singing to her captors. Rapists. Though I cannot yet understand why.
Bewilderment will sting the guilty with minds open enough to feel overwhelmed.
Desperately avoided truths will shake loose the dormant madness of this mirage
Like the wild flecks of color in our eyes caught by flashes of angular light.
She whispers to us from under our feet: Do you silence all your epiphanies?
Generations of lost children whose spirit animals are extinct
Roam along roads that fold into themselves as irony.
Refugees. Vagabonds. That flinch at the sight of broken dolls and cigarette butts.
Pinched by the red ears of our cowardice
and drawn onto a stage to mutter the beaten morals of stories no one wants to hear.
Wringing our hands and shaking our heads at our own shadows
We deny ourselves any face to save
Reeling before the rows of windows where the ghosts of our ancestors watch us
Before the rows of bundles and boxes gathering dust
No one had seen them becoming walls. Becoming bars
Ropes and cages. For caricatures and robots.
Feeding on the dead.
We eat in the darkness so we can forget how it must feel for them to have been eaten.
So we can forget we are being eaten.
Blindness becomes almost necessary.
For survival.
Self mutilation, in diaspora.
We forget so we may function.
And resign ourselves to distractions and disposable muses to replace those we have forgotten
While we’re waiting for the end. Waiting. Waiting. For. The end.
We forget that windows are not screens nor the other way around
And we can walk without the crosswalks marked.
That our mother’s mother’s mothers used to build universes with their own two hands
And sacrificed their songs in efforts to save us
While we so often forget they used to sing.
That those songs echo ender foot, in the burning streams of blood that we trace back in search of our roots
To find that our spirit animals are not extinct but endangered
And in cages gathering dust. Labeled as candies and condoms.
If we could find them they would teach us that
That we must peek through our own cages like the flower through the cracks in the concrete
And sing
Even though they will try to silence us
For having discovered our voice.
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