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I Have Thousands of Reasons
I have thousands of reasons
but you will only hear one
because the ants have fumigated your soul.
I have potions of ink
but you won't use them.
They walk hand in hand with narcissism.
I have cold compresses
given to me by an old woman
but they believe it is cold
so you won't help them with climate change.
I finally have birds that will stay,
but you put chicken wire on their legs.
I know the key card.
I know of the key card
that erases hate,
but I have no door to place it.
I have pistachios that cure depression
but they believe that green is the color of solitude.
I have sardines that cure hunger,
but the ocean ate them,
and the fishermen are drunk.
I have the necklace you lost
but you have no trust to wear it.
I have thousands of reasons
but you will only hear one.
My potions of ink are bottomless,
but you won't use them.
My cold compresses would cool the Earth
but you like it warm.
Your tan might fade.
My key card is useless.
You don't want to open doors.
If you hold your hunger pangs,
you prove you are successful.
Doors are better closed.
You like your depression.
You won't eat my pistachios.
It serves you well.
Sardines, they are no longer in fashion.
You might have to eat yourself.
I have thousands and thousands of reasons,
but you would like for me to come empty-handed.
I have thousands of reasons for love,
if you open.
If you open.
If you are open.
In the door, in the door of the ocean.
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2. |
This Is The Moment
04:55
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This Is The Moment
This is the moment when all five senses speak at once.
Where all the languages you know make a chorus.
For your genders unify in more than rainbows.
Where religions in you read each other's theologies
This is the moment when the pores open up
to drink water, and water takes the shape of understanding.
This is the moment when your throat sinks further than opera
and bees sweeten the world of ingrates.
This is the moment when colorism matters not
This is the moment when you inhale the water you were to drink for the rest of your life
and pour it unto the seedlings inside you
When you know you came here to stir the oceans
to feed the whales with your mind.
When you understand that Greta Thunberg speaks before you but not for you
You came here to stir the oceans
to feed the whales with your mind.
Running on clouds, it is droplets that squirt unto our faces
never washing us clean
Droplets of water when we need gallons to satiate our historic thirst.
We've been running on clouds for centuries
Unable to sit, unable to stop, unable to trust
Our step unable to drink.
Frontera Dogs
Running on clouds.
This is the moment when all five senses speak at once.
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3. |
Xochiquetzal
04:00
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Xochiquetzal
Xochiquetzal, goddess of sensuality, feasting, craftsmanship,
among other pleasures
Patron of weavers, embroiderers, silversmiths, and sculptors
Xochiquetzal, we, who invented private kitchens to cook alone,
to die in solitude,
we do.
We who cook for one and share with none
We who progress by destroying
We who shop for food begrudgingly or as a pastime
and know not the joy of eating flowers
selling at the mercado
coloring our faces and bodies
envision eurisms.
We who collect pots and pans we might never use
and forgo mixtamal daily for hamburger buns made last year
We who recycle clothes instead of gifting them
who waste our lovemaking cadences on ourselves frivolously
and use our nails instead of tools
Bless you.
These days, you would know us ill, broken, materialistic, brute, lazy, broken, ignorant
And yet we weave food into love
celebrations, close, satisfaction, heart
In order to remember a world you navigated in your colorful quetzal feathers
Our quest is in fact a feather
we can fill with ink
We women are still burned in milk, indomitable.
We make books with cheesepaper, ricepaper, tortillas, and other nourishing ingredients
that sometimes crumble upon perusal.
Liquids are hard to gel, Xochiquetzal.
For the pleasure of reading
Our sins are immense
Our ink is the opposite of octopus
We wipe our eyes with honey.
Women bees we are, producing endlessly sweet bile.
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4. |
Latitude and Longitude
05:16
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Latitude and Longitude
Resist assuming anything about anyone
Resist making decisions for others without asking them what they want
Resist speaking for others when they can speak for themselves
Speak for others when they cannot speak
because they are being excluded or are not present in the conversation,
or are being made invisible.
Question the invisibility of a group or an individual.
Question the silence.
Include the silence as part of the speech of the group or individual resisting otherness.
Use your five senses in knowing and underlining difficult issues
and their absence.
Know that only the other
can understand
the other fully.
Give all the opportunity to ally with the other on their own perspective
Always be kind even as you disagree
Respect is free,
and can be given away in large quantities
without hurting any individual.
You cannot respect anyone too much.
O, longitude and latitude of loss.
O, longitude and latitude of life.
Of sacrifice.
Of selflessness.
O, longitude and latitude of humanity.
Have you measured the time it takes for fruit to reach the worth of indispensibility?
You invented a key to Pandora's Box.
Only it's no longer Pandora.
She is now Maria.
Maria de musica
Maria de nada
Maria de limpia
Maria de ayuda
She is now Maria Mary.
O, longitude and latitude of loss.
When will you understand?
You were not placed for intimacy.
But you still need it.
Have you questioned the Sun about its unforgiving scars?
Do you know the children of loss?
Who will teach them?
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5. |
Sustainable Panacea
02:36
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Sustainable Panacea
This city is cruel without you
The city knows your balms
the medicine of amistad
Like an eraseasketch pad
your voice nurtures my life
effaces the wrong
ablates pain
The city is cruel without you.
Homeopathy is yet unknown
for suffering matters
You are the manzanilla yerba buena of my essence.
They do not have page numbers for this healing.
Your remedies are touch
There's no bibliographic entry for the details of your love
They constitute your pain
Erase around my life
No pill will be sold to replace aspirin
because of you
Filial love has other possibilities today
This city is cruel without you.
When I thought rain was God's tears, it made me sad.
But you told me that rain was life
and to let it drop upon my face
The city is cruel without you.
I know
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6. |
Palpitating Your Fears
05:59
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Palpitating Your Fears
I am not the palpitating moment of your fears.
Come, measure me in your tears of joy
In the landscape of friendship I am immensely small and terribly deep
I want to freeze the road of your pain
find the squirrel hard to disaffect ??????
the solitude of ignorance
I want to bury your feelings in an envelope of forgetfulness
wholeness, forgiveness, all those things that are ness
After the act of being whole, give me your past loss
I will fill it with wonder
I am not the palpitating moment of your fears.
I will file it in the amazement of phantoms
Carry it, your fear
to the flower offerings of May
in a small town in a foreign country
Perfume it, your fear.
In the distance of absence
email it to God.
Uninterrupted washing silence
from my life
bleaching stubborn scars from the mind with precision
all the should haves, could haves, dones and undones
wins and unwins
mute indiscretions and taciturn sins
Perhaps and maybes of the past
I am not the palpitating moment of your fears.
I will wait until it appears
The door to cleanliness only you could open
with this mantra:
I am not the palpitating moment of your fears.
The key is in the cloud
The pronoun cloud
Open it.
Because I love you on a deserted island
that is life
I will write to you with a roll of toilet paper
I will write on a cloud for you
like the Chinese women brocaded their lavish shirts at night
to not hurt you, I will write of my love to you
on dirt.
I am not the palpitating moment of your fears.
I will mail to you an archive of newly felt kisses.
Through the internet of my heart.
Of my heart
Dissipate your fears
You will know that scars are the shadow aversions of your palpitating words
You are the ring on the broken finger that holds it together.
Your silver lining is not limited to me
It is what I don't think I need that I need,
Precisely what I won't say I need that I need.
Our needs: a heavy porcelain that drowns in ocean water
Deep rides unheard.
In thirst, we all obey our hungers
Our hungers linger.
But understand.
I am not the palpitating moment of your fears.
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7. |
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Before You Lose The Ocean
Like a crab
the movement sideways
losing a leg endlessly
Conjugating its soul
in languages unknown to itself
The country at large
parades its blemished
infantilelike consciousness
People waving flags disclose
handicap nationalism
like a SARS virus outside of China
no flag to hold
Demonstrations of thirty thousand gagged
by the suave media camouflage
We stand guilty pioneers to the world
we still don't understand
We stand guilty pioneers to the world
in the long line of forgiveness
Our sins hang on pins
from the clothesline of the Equator
And the latitudinally palpitating xenophobia
in our country smears
storms the air with
parcheesi-like ladders that held us to ignorance
Our questions fill the country
held back several years from graduation grammar school
Our credit cards boneless
Our stoic cars filled with the dark juice of forgetfulness
Our souls on lease to someone else's guilt
Verguenza agena. ?????
Our tears for rent to hire bettors of pain.
Our sins hang on pins
from the clothesline of the Equator
There's no place unread by time
Deciphered by education where one can hide
There's no place where palms can be read by past events
where books will no longer embrace you
letter hug you
sentences whispered to you
You have encountered yourself on paper
It was your destiny
in your learning of life
to find your passion
on the bark of a tree
It's all a spiral of knowledge
Yet an unending and undeciphered letter
to write your life
before you lose the ocean.
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8. |
To You Steve
03:00
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To You Steve
To you, Steve
I was Sophia Loren
It's morning
You approached me
at the Wells Fargo ATM in Wallingford
as I withdraw forty dollars in fast cash
You wrapped in a blanket, sleepy, drowsy
almost all of you concrete
only the streetlights of your eyes
are green and red
Your skin jaundiced
I immediately say I don't have change
Can't give you a twenty
Well, we can go get change, I suppose
You say, I don't want money
Change, I can probably get
What I really need today is to get to Pioneer Square
or information on the bus that goes to Pioneer Square
I have an appointment with another lawyer at nine
I don't dispute that you are a lawyer
You are surely a casualty of stress
I say
This is your lucky day
I can take you that way
You will give me a ride
Yes, I say
Your incredulous quarter smile says where's your car
Before you get into the Prius
You eye it with approval
and you say
Do you have newspapers?
I don't want to ruin your car. Your seat.
You carefully put newspapers all over the front passenger seat
almost caressing it with compassion
It will hold you
Your nose is runny
You're a lawyer from Yakima
a class of seventy three graduate from the U
in your unsheltered decomposition
you say you think
I'm twenty years younger than I am
and I say
I'm a professor
You say
wow, appearances are really deceiving.
But you're really not talking about me
I'm just the pudding on the proof
You're a lawyer that cracked
going to meet a lawyer that didn't
yet.
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9. |
Home Is Not
05:10
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Home Is Not
Home is not
Where children nightmare
where grandmas suffer
in their minds
the Earth changes from brown to red
and it is not colorado
Where your children breathe only as they die
where you owe all and eat all of your neighbors food
where we the US have turned their home into mercury rivers
home is not
and sends their fishing villages
where local pescado campo
????
only in Japan
where chayotes are exported and sencotles die of thirst
from our toxic waste
leaving behind diarrheic black waters for babies to drink
villages south of our south border
where men have left to the US
where there are no men
home is not
during our wars to build homes
load trains
there are not men
rivet the metal plates
there are no men
where young girls exploited
are snatched by narcos at fourteen
home is not
home is not
we the US have hobbled their homes ?
And now they're knocking at our door
the two thousand mile door
with electronic chicken wire
and superheroes that herd the victims in protest
protect the rich imposters
home is not
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10. |
Dry Salad Sand
01:30
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Dry Salad Sand
No factory of mythic
her body shut down
no more baby shoes dangling from her mirror
dry salad sand
america
the once woman bus
the ninety nine cent store
once open to hope
bankrupt
the wire woman's veins knotted together
a net
the seamstresses at the sweatshop cannot keep up
mending
the holes are bigger than the country
no more blood veins to knit, sew, or staple
the country together
staple the country together
with green paper
it won't mache any longer
dry salad sand
the once estados unidos man
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11. |
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The Circle Has Not Encircled Us
Blind eye
a London eye is far too high
for us to see
I am not seeing
egg yellow
mexican orange
peruvian turquoise
red rubies
pomegranate red
street light green
are missing from the wheel
Round as it is
the circle has not encircled us
We're still waiting
for awards
We're still waiting
for language
Think
Time to close the camps
The tour leader explains to us
it was common for the regular sin
to invest in slavery
common for the regular citizen
to invest in slavery
It was common
comparing the practice
to buying shoes
today
made by child labor
It was common
The London eye
the blind eye
it makes me dizzy
still going around
without saying
Londoneers, jump the ocean
to see the babies incarcerated
modern life slavery
because of their skin and dark eyes
They walked the wrong line
Gold is being earned
by circling quietly for tourists
who escaped the embarassing US fox news
away on vacation
from contested borders
admiring your english accents
blind eye
in London
dogs don't bark
they don't bite
in London
dogs don't speak
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12. |
Did You Know?
02:04
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Did You Know ?
Did you know
in spanish
mangoes avocadoes apricots peaches and others
have bones?
Did you know
watermelon's heart
is only at the center?
Did you know that
garlic has teeth that sometimes are vengeful?
And their bite is endless?
Did you know orange skins can become necklaces?
They are eternal.
Did you know
pears are made of butter?
Did you know
that Buddha has hands in a lemon?
And that onions and cauliflower
can think because they are heads?
Did you know banana peels
can speak sadness when they fall face down on the floor?
Aplatanados
Did you know that corn has angel hair?
Did you know that coconut can mean wound and head
that pomegranates are grenades
and that chiles sweat before they lose their skins?
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13. |
These Are The Hands
01:26
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These Are The Hands
These are the hands
that could sand a wooden bench
This is the coast I am from
Not Monterey or Carmel
but the coast of canneries and fields
the coast of hands
the coast of naufragos, adrift
the coast of those who produce
respect
and disrespect
I'm from the coast
of tears that never dry
the coast of blood
we seldom survive
the coast of bullets
and resistance
the coast of girasoles, huisaches and nopales
the coast of heat that scorches your eyes and hands
No touch
No sight is left
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14. |
She Is Not
04:16
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She Is Not
The statue of liberty is a woman
Have you noticed the rust rust rust
of repetition?
She is not that.
Have you marveled on the beauty
of materialism?
No, she is not that.
She is not the
tortured broken torchlight of razors
on women's hairless legs
or the tricycle not given
the bicycle not taken
to see the beach
or the frisbee that can never be free
She is not. Not. Not. Not. Not.
The unforgiveness of frustration
or the dark passion of
an interned japanese man
on a world war two camp
The picnic basket
bottomless
filled with pleasure
she is
She's the bookseller
who sent books home every day
Karma for a quart
She's the noisy pedalboat
who leads a child to infinity
She is the garden
the japanese man planted in the fifties
when he finally felt the future
touched his greenhouse
Yes, like the statue of liberty
she'll take you to a place you've never been
a place you've never been
inside your own house
A pixel.
Stuck on each page
A pixel.
Stuck on each race
The medal won by
speaking the language of loyalty.
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15. |
If I Told You
03:33
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If I Told You
You will never thank me
I will not be thanked
I will imitate your sincerity
and loyalty
You will never admit
to have learned from me
You finished your work
because you saw me confused in mine
I have many more privileges
that I did not see
You have many privileges
that you only saw
because of me
I will thank you and others
profusely
from now on
for the inspiration
Not easily found
Your loyalty
My loyalty
to your culture
to your family
to your work
to your friends
to your children
I became a better person
If I told you
the light of lamps
is not unhurt
you would believe me
and so did they
the migrants
that are now the cross
this government
drags on its back
Let me eviscerate the pain
Let me take the entrails of dolor
dolorosa
doloriendo
dolores
lola
walking to the border
droplets of her liquids
walking
running
hiding
with her droplets
of her blood
praying the rosary for others
the train was no relief
falling
and not falling
the train was no relief
Let me count the steps
to a hope
a hope turned destruction
where your child loses his mother
His identity
his country
his milk
his father
his brothers and sisters
his traditions
his culture
all at once
on the line
that is not a line
that was never a line
He also loses
his mind
in a horrid mess
of misunderstandings
Perhaps he loses his mind too
I f I told you
that the light of lamps is not unhurt
you would believe me.
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16. |
Might We Bottle It?
04:08
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Might We Bottle It?
That endearing sentiment
your liquid green vision
adapted from the cup of culture
from which it is not
the resounding knock
of your just measure
your regard for the chair
in which they must sit
as yours
the deleted doubt
you ask might this care be enough
might her chemotherapy be enough
might we build enough buildings
to take enough cancers away
promenade them
to surrealistic countries
with death
for foreigners
tomorrow
while you sleep
while your sleep
is a pomade
that keeps watch
over strangers and friends in pain
you ask in wisdom
is this enough
will they keep making cancers
I don't know
there are endless
immeasurable
bottles of love
in your hands
incandescent bottles of opportunity
in your future
rations of compassion
in bottles
you have water
in patience
weeding out the mud
and you ask
is this enough?
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Eric Muhs Seattle, Washington
gigging musician since 1981 in Seattle's seminal "new wave" bands STUDENT NURSE & AUDIO LETER. Got into recording in late 80's in Santa Cruz with MATA RATA. Built homemade 4 track tape loop system for 200 + solo performances. Now live back in Seattle, where I make instruments & perform with Metal Men. I've got a modest solar-powered recording studio. More at www.invisiblemusicstudio.org ... more
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