The Goddess Poem

You say you don't know the name of this goddess
Don't know what to call her when she walks in like a thief to steal your attention
She has been called Isis, Aphrodite, and Oshun
has been known to respond to Epona, Mazu, and Devi
but you don't know the name of this goddess who appears in front of you.
with a spine straight like an oak tree trunk
eyes like paintbrushes,
silken edges dipped in the different shades of this world
with a sapphire skeleton and an amethyst voice
she shifts her weight like there are diamonds between her thighs
just waiting to drip down to the arches of her feet,
caressing every natural curve of her flesh on the way down
where the basement level of her legs kiss the earth hello on both cheeks every time they meet.

She shines with a rose colored starlight
that emulates from the edges of her fingertips-
Ten soft half moons at the ends of her branches of palms
with crop circle fingerprints
she can make you tremble with a single half note staccato touch
make your skin split apart like the grand canyon
so you can see all the smooth layers that have been flowing through you this whole time.

She has honeysuckle kisses from seashell lips
that have been smoothed over by the constant coming and going of the ocean
but the strength to shut out the tsunami waves of life that strike so unexpectedly
making her start fresh.

a new beginning.
a morning begun with a flower tucked behind her ear
so you can literally see the ideas blooming in her mind;
the thought that she is a unique beauty
filled with hope
and wrapped in secrets
raised by the wind
with a soul made of lavender scented band aids
stuck across the scars in her chest
she can't pull them off for fear of bleeding again,
for letting herself flow out like the angry red clouds that tear apart the sky
for just a moment
before the sun leaves.

But in the warmth of the moon, she will dance.
She will adorn her limbs with pearls
so you can see them roll across her skin,
you can hear her move to the rhythm she creates herself
tracing patterns in the stardust with her eyelashes

This goddess moves.
This goddess breathes.
This goddess will wait
and if you are patient
This goddess will speak her name.

Wishing on a firefly

the first time i realized what hope actually looked like
I held lightning bugs in a water bottle on the beach of new york.
It was the beginning of summer but it was still raining
but it was more of a mist than anything
like the clouds wanted to kiss the earth but were too shy to make the first move
so they just leaned in and kept their chin tilted in the right direction

and i watched those little bugs flicker
realized that i couldn't see any of the stars through the thick stretches of cumulus that had accumulated above me
but i was holding pieces of the night sky in that empty water bottle
I had taken street lamp lights and captured them
no longer let them shimmer across the bay
the way they do when all other lights have gone out
creating ripples of bright streaks in the water
that never reached all the way over to where i was standing

I held wishes in my hands
because those fireflies had just fallen out of the space beyond us in the universe
and into my fingertips
so i watched their gossamer wings dance and asked them what secrets had been whispered to them
but I don't know if fireflies have ears
so i touched their antennas
hoping that they would be able to feel my curiosity
at the desires that had been cast at them by small children who look up when the moon rises
and say
star light star bright
first star i see tonight
wish i may
wish i might
have the wish i wish tonight

and send their thoughts up like balloons to reach into the heavens
but i never understood how wishes could get to the stars if they actually carried any weight
so i would imprint fingerprint promises to the backsides of coins and toss them into fountains
wait until the clock became a palindrome of one's
or hold my breath through a tunnel
to make the wishes i wanted so badly
until one day i figured i was too old to wish for things any more
so i put my thoughts onto scraps of paper like the insides of little future fortune cookies
tucked them into a jar
hoping that some day
i would find a carrier pigeon with strong enough wings to carry all my wishes to the stars

but when i held those lightning bugs
it was like I was a kid all over again
and i touched them with my jar of wishes and asked them to tell the other stars
how long I'd been waiting
to feel hopeful again.

Nightmares

Saturday morning.
which turned into saturday afternoon
I sat motionless and silent on a bed different than my own
in a place unfamiliar but I was supposed to call it home
supposed to fill it with new memories, tuck my comfort zone around the edges of the doorframes
and trace smiles into the pillowcases while I slept.

but those smiles were hiding
suppressed by enough turmoil in my recent history
to make it feel like I had a tornado in my chest where my emotions should have been
so I sat in the eye of it, where everything was calm and I could be content with being numb.
and I learned that the center of chaos loves the sounds of vowels.
loved me when I sat and looked around with my eyes at the inner edges of the eye
breathed deep to let out a sigh
full of the times I almost said goodbye
to four different people i know
in the last two months
and I was the only reason why they didn't go.
the world came at me so fast and i just wanted to set the speed to slow
less rushing past all the beauty just outside my windows
less phone calls from people I loved who were about to be harmed by their own hands
less hurries, less worries
less times feeling like i didn't belong.

and I tried to make a home in the middle of the storm
only to realize that the second half of it had yet to hit
so I shouldn't build a home, but a bunker, or a fort
made of security blankets and pillows without smiles
because the nightmares wouldn't go away.
they would steal my composure and almost stole my sanity
I would wake up unaware of where I was
convinced that my sister had just died,
or my father and I were victims of a new plague
that someone I loved had gone missing
and I couldn't do anything about it.

My soul was screeching like a banshee, trying to get out of my chest
but I shoved it so far back in myself that it fell of the edge of my mental desk
back where it could collect dust and mingle with other things that i've lost or forgotten
like how to be myself
a multitude of life lessons
or how badly it stings when you have to say goodbye.

so it makes sense that it found a way out through my subconscious
it found a voice when I had lost mine
so that saturday morning turned afternoon
I immersed myself in spoken words
poetry from all over
and I watched video after video after video
I re learned all the lessons
I felt the pain I've been trying to hide away because goodbye isn't really goodbye, it's more of a see you later when our paths cross again
and I remembered who I am.

the edge of that tornado hit me when I felt the rhythm in the poet's voices
remembered that as a little girl, I found that rhythm
rode that beat with my arms that I thought were wings until my shoulder blades were tired of trying to reach something so out of reach
but I craned my neck to stare at the sky and imagined I was a crane
I felt that flow of words, flowing out of my head, flowing out of my pen
it is in that universal one, two, three, four
that I found a home
that I find a place to belong.
right. here.

Honeysuckle kisses

So the other day I performed a poem called "goddess" and there's a line in it that goes "she has honeysuckle kisses from seashell lips", and my friend Andy Tran came up to me afterwards and asked where he could get one. I texted him a few days later, and this is the conversation that unfolded:

V: I figured out where you can get honeysuckle kisses from seashell lips. You can get them from letting her laughter dance on your lips like bumblebees that spend too much time near the sea because they want to know what it's like to fly along the horizon.

A: But what if I'm afraid to let the laughter in? You see...i'm bad with commitment. I've made some terrible choices in my life that I've got to live with--the kinds that cant ever be remedied, not even with honeysuckle kisses or dancing bumblebees. Not even with the raw touch of the ocean breeze. You could, spend a lifetime trying to convince me otherwise but it won't work. Trust me...I've tried. Cuz when the laughter fades, it'll be me..not you..stuck with the sounds of what could have been haunting my dreams at night.

V: Who's to say that the same ghouls don't haunt my dreams after floating through yours? Maybe I've just made my mind into a river scene that's so beautiful, no one wants to see what's at the bottom of the river, so I don't show them. They don't want to see the twisted curls of metal that have begun to rust or the layers of watery dust that have permeated the cracks of all the baggage I don't want to be carrying anymore.

A: I've swam through enough of these stories-- shallow and deep. I've bent metal bars with bare hands and watched as they dived into river waters just to show her how easy it was to sink. She said she wanted to try it and so we jumped. And that's where she left me. A place where the sun never shines. Where the rain drops get so cold my bones refuse to dance in them. Not because they can't, but because my heart tells them the pain isn't worth dancing for.

V: But sometimes you have to leap into the space between where the air and the ocean meet to feel what it's like to fly. Just for a moment, before you realize that you have to spend an eternity with your wings clipped, feeling the gusts of wind under your feathers but know you can never be free. Those moments of pure exhilaration- those are the ones worth living for.

A: I've found plenty of things worth living for but I have yet to set eyes on something worth dying for. Now I've been told that means I'm not fit to live. But I'm ok with that. You see, I've never seen eye to eye with social normalty. Give me clipped wings and I'll soar to eternity. Distance myself from this world of negativity and flourish...on my own.

V: I have never seen eye to eye with the roles I was supposed to fill. I was too high up in the trees I climbed to be wearing the glass slippers of poor self image that were made to fit my feet. And when I got down to the ground, I was too busy kneeling in the dirt, staring at fallen leaves to slip into the ballgown of feminine grace that has been hanging in my closet behind all my other skeletons ever since. So I grabbed a thicker skin made of out the iron edged gleam I was told appeared in my eyes and asked the goddess of unfulfilled stereotypes to bear with me.

A: I used to think it was destiny. That I was destined to be a hero...catching self esteem suicides that would throw themselves from treetops. I was not their good fortune, I was their miracle. Their second chance to learn how to fly. But all the while I was really just waiting to find that girl with the honeysuckle kiss. They told me she was in need of a hero.

V: Honey sits on her lips because it balances the bitterness that rests on her tongue. She's been tasting it ever since she realized that her hero decided not to give a damn. She became her own hero and her own Atlas, carrying the weight of the world atop her entire spine.