Biology

"Cause if you're not really there
Then the stars don't even matter
Now I'm filled to the top with fear
But it's all just a bunch of matter" -Sam Sparro, Black and Gold

This song speaks about love, but also matter, which is a subject that is beyond intriguing. I sat in my room yesterday investigating my body and trying to understand it. And objectively speaking, humans and animals are just flesh, bones, skin, muscles, and fat. Seventy percent water and yet we have the ability to live, breathe, think, and most staggering, continue to reinvent and create. All from bones and flesh, a soccer player who runs 4 minute miles and jumps however high is created. It's mind-blowing. I wish I were better at math and science.

"Can we pretend like airplanes
in the night sky are like shooting stars
I could really use a wish right now (wish right now, wish right now)"
"And all the glitz and the glam and the fashion
And all the pandemonium and all the madness
There comes a time where you fade to the blackness
And when you’re staring at that phone in your lap
And you hoping but them people never call you back" -B.O.B ft Hayley Williams.

But what I'm more astonished is how flesh and bones can create passion, strive, emotion, and a philosophical belief system that defines each person. Basically how flesh and matter create a spirit as though when stars die, their mass of energy gets transferred to us.

The idea of the tattoo is brilliant because it’s so passionate and daring. To have something a person feels passionately about or triggered by that he/she must have it on his/her being, I think is astonishing. And for me, my spirit comprises of words. Empathy, meaning human connection and the desire to feel what the other is feeling, is inked on my back. When I think about what is essential, PERSEVERANCE always comes up. It goes hand in hand with PERSISTENCE. A reminder to myself to keep going could possibly be inked on each foot.

On my wrists, the idea of words such as STRENGTH and FREEDOM. I speak through words and writing and that’s where my strength as a woman flourishes. And maybe mid-way down my back, EQUALITY. I have scoliosis. The top of my back is curved one way and the bottom, another way. Like an S, it balances itself out. It speaks to the idea that all the parts are equally important. All the human races are equally important. All the human sexes and genders are equally important. And everyone should be given opportunity to have freedom, literally and figuratively, to be free from prejudice and to be happy.

And then there's the word, REVOLUTION, a must.

To imagine, all these ideas of human kind and right/wrong comes from biology and the flesh of human bodies.

Select Works

Spoken word poet Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai who I met in D.C.

"You know that I love you, boy
hot like Mexico, rejoice
At this point, I gotta choose
Nothing to lose" - Lady Gaga

I look back and realize how writing has been like a religion to me, almost a savior. It's an act of confessing and confronting the thousands of fears, insecurities, joys, pains, confusions that I hold as a human.

If life is full of "ebbs and flows"/ "peaks and valleys"... I guess through writing I can realize that from ages 16-20 was a dark place that I've always tried to confront, however unsuccessfully I may be. I realize it. I don't run from it because that was what I did then and who I was. Thank goodness it made me pick up a pen and write poems, letters, diary entries, stories, opinions so religiously that I began to figure out my heart.

But what is different between going into 22 and those 4 years was that no one else then was invested in my heart or knew how to deal with it and how to make it stronger. Junior year I've been blessed with people who push me and see me even when at times, I don't see myself. They've made me cry, laugh, and speak; they would push me open when I would be enticed to closing up. I've had this fear since I was 17, understandably, that people would leave and never come back. But today some of the people who can't stay, who I met and who know a piece of me that people in Portland will never know, I feel have invested in my growth and in my heart by prying, not taking the easy road and by not only hearing but listening.

Thus, even as lonely and depleting as Portland is and always has been, I feel that I have them (from Fall Semester at Colby, to NY, to IHP) here. Going into 22, I write more about my journey to grab onto and hold onto the strength, care, and inspirations that have helped me move forward with my happiness and my passions even when physically these people aren't here to hold my hand. Still a lot of puzzles and confrontations but I think I'm going through a peak.

Some Free-Writes from the past month:
---
"One"

I get chills as my vessels miss you

The songs we sing to the earth through our
melodies of making love,
with our tongues as the harp
And our lips the guitar sending vibrations of passion
into the horizon and hoping

mother earth absorbs our fire
And spews back love
when you’re not near
---
"Run"

If I were in a perfect world
I would
run back to hindsight and change our limelight
from what was to what could’ve been
and make the shiny silk spin into a fantasy of a girl
ready to run from her clingy friend, Lonesome
Which she lets tower through the fire
of persistence and desires
though resistance

springs

like a trampoline depleting the emotions
which would fulfill a wholeness in a perfect world
Where the desired desires
her
---
"Greed"

Let it drift
the way hair flows to the wind
and opens up pages of my diary
that now reads...

"what if I don't miss you the way I once did
and what if the body caressed with no substance
and what if the soul
confused lust with "us"
fabricated by our lonely ventures into
the unknown"

so I
held your hands and connected those fingers
to my heart
but what if
that once needed comfort... I no longer miss?
And what if, without fear,
what I felt
was platonic?

"Distant Relatives"

A few killer Nas lines

"My history is that I'm from the land of the theives." in America

"It's a journey, some will get left behind
'cause in life you can not press rewind
Get it right, you only have one first chance
To make one first impression that lasts a lifetime" in Strong Will Continue

"From the mouth, I could spit out a razor." in Nah Mean

Everyone knows that everyone was once Black and everyone is from Africa. Yet in our recent humanity, the most beautiful people who gave birth to the rest of us, some who now have blonde hair and blue eyes, have become the most hated, exploited, and discriminated against people on this globe.

In Nas and Damian Marley's album, "Distant Relatives", they sing/write/rap about how we're all distant relatives yet we're not united and we treat each other like shit. The case with Arizona and Texas in 2010 is shocking to say the least... and what's more shocking is that people don't find it shocking. People don't believe that others deserve human rights and proper human acknowledgement simply because they look different. And people don't see that without immigrants and the hard work of immigrants, America is nothing, and white Americans wouldn't have anything... yet there's a sense of entitlement, defensiveness, and fear about what "white people own" and what "white people deserve."

The slave trade IS one of the biggest wrongs in human history and it shouldn't be made PC and ok in history books. A people's voice and history should not be erased. Continuous white greed has to be acknowledged in order for history not to repeat itself, the way it is even today with negative images of all people of color portrayed throughout America so much so that people of color start to believe in their own limitations.

From Africa Must Wake Up "The Black Oasis, Ancient Africa the Sacred, Awaken, The Sleeping Giant, Science, Art is your creation."

Art, science, religion, everything came from Africa. And the descendents spread throughout the world and made more beautiful inventions and made all beautiful people of all shades and strengths and views. But if the human race is a family, why is it that an individualistic view has completely taken over and made one shade more "worthy", "wealthy", and "entitled" to anything? Why is it that they fear and have grudges against their own brothers and sisters? It's weird to me because it's everywhere, in Viet Nam, in Maine, in Texas, in the homes of people of color even. This is not progressive, this is going backwards.