I’ve been trying to find a happy spot
A place to rest my mind
Let my body recover
Come to peace with a 56-year-old life
A danced life
A painted life
A sculpted life
A teaching life
A creative life
Born into a body that knows no other way
With a mind polka dotted missing some of the essentials
Memory
mathematics
Grammar-spelling
Things I couldn’t and still can’t do
The baseline for success in a capitalistic white society
I was branded dumb
A child that was never granted childhood
Collected soda bottles in the fourth grade
Greeting strangers
Going door to door
Begging
To feed me a prize from golden arches
A cheeseburger
The catchup, mustard, sprinkle of grilled onions, and dill pickle being my favorite parts
Always hungry
Always feeling the missing parts of a mother overwhelmed single parenting
Don’t know if she ever found her happy spot
Life left here at 50
She stroked out
Though she was always breaking my heart
She was my heart
Broken hearted that was my beginning
And poor
Welfare moms are usually penniless
And so too are their children
By the fifth grade, I’d learned to use my body to barter for food
This, before I knew the meaning of granting permission
I’d lend myself out to be used
And men, they were always willing
To take a boy, to have a boy,
To satisfy their hunger
Physical and emotional hunger drove me
Men fed upon me
In retune I ate after
My polka dotted mind turned to black
Lights out
Dot to voids
In their clutches
Checked out
Searing penetrating pain is like that
I went blank
I try to imagine him
The little boy me
But like most broken boys he’s locked me out
Or maybe my week memory is a saving grace
My mind has always allowed me to escape
Tricks one learns watching roaches scale the walls
My shield, a thin worn diaphanous bed sheet
There were no happy spots in being a child
Only landmine terrain of city life
All of it a horror
Until I danced
Dancing was the first and only thing that set me apart
Gave my being distinction
Oh how I loved being in motion
Evoking joy in others
Witnessing them, wittiness the dance that was me
I’ve shared what I can’t do
But what I could do was anticipate the next line of music
And flow perfectly to and with it
My mind could jump forward in a song
Allowing for my body to never chase the sound but be one with it
I could feel music cellularly
Ancestral memory never die
Humans have always danced
My body the warehouse
A mystical tap opened
Dance flowed through me
Didn’t need teaching my body held the knowledge
Music unlocked it
My tiny child body possessed of the dance
Eyes locked on me in wonder
I could feel their attention
A mixture of doubt, lust(for some), and disbelief
How can a child move like that?
Their fooling eyes saw a child
A child not there
It is a funny thing to feel wanted
Not for who you are but for what you can do
Dancing witnessed, I could sense what it felt like to be wanted
A speck of happy entered me
I liked being seen
I wanted to be wanted
Dance drew others close and flung me far out into the world
I grew up dancing around the planet
What a life
To have danced a life
Now 56 no longer dancing
Dealing with the loss of my happy spot
No longer in motion
Keeping brittle at bay
Bitter battling
It’s hard because I’ve a grown mind
Retrospectively dancing saved my life
Books set me free
But neither cured the dilemma of poverty
Or my skin that gets browned
Too brown for comfort
That I’m gay could play a part too
Things stacked against me
Didn’t stop me
But I’ve never been able to advance either
Not past a certain spot
That out-of-reach place
A happy spot?
We’ve an infected sick culture
A fevered capitalism
The delusion of a white race
Thresholding fascism
Illusions of freedom
Ignorance and ignoring truth
Fashionable
favoring the big lie
A lie
Untruths twisted until belief shift
And what was true is no more
All of which historically speaking precedes a fall
Historically speaking falling in step with dictators
Historically speaking destroying human rights
Historically speaking silencing thinkers, creators, dissenters
Freedom diminishes
Democracy disguised until not
And then poof like a speck of dust it is gone
Humanity stalls
And for a period of time
While held dumbstruck within the calamity of it all
Denial will outweigh reason
Repetitions of what it means to be human will play themselves out
Rather than reason
The killing will come
That is what it means to be human
Sold a golden ticket to heaven for defending a tyrant
Sacrificial lambs giving their life and they will give their life
Only to be toppled over time
To fall and recover
A dancing phrase
Derelict souls PTSD’ed
Another will rise
Rinse and repeat
Hamster wheel spinning to no place
To borrow a Diva’s phrase
This is how I feel, I don’t think you know how I feel
This is how
I feel
I don’t
Think
You Know how
I feel
This is how
I feel
I don’t
Think
The loop de loop of a broken dream
King’s wail was not enough to wake derelict dreamers
A life and its true value
Only realized
One way
The recognition of placement
Where are we
On a planet
Buckminster Fuller’s take on it is a planet spaceship
I like that
A blue dot of a spaceship
Sailing within trillions of universes
Found in space
Consumed by ever advancing forward
Further
No place to go
Our spacesuits only work on earth
Custom designed for one-wear use only
To last a lifetime
Then like every other thing alive once
Will earth become once more
We are not visitors
We are not passing through
We are earth
Forgotten though
Big brains thinking superiority the rule
The jokes on us
Laws of nature win every time over man’s rules/laws
Humans can write laws
Enforce laws
Break laws
Kill in the name of Law and order
Undo Laws
All illusions of Laws
Humankind does not rule the earth
Never has and never will
The earth
The queen of recycling does
She writes the laws
And every spot, dot, and speck of life here will be returned to her
A happy place to locate.
In the meantime
These exponentially mean- times
Pause and remember
Where you came from
Not who you came from
But where you came from
If you arrive in a womb
Go one step further
An egg within a womb
Within a womb within an egg
Forever cycling life
The grandmother held the egg
Her daughter
The daughter the egg that would become her child
The essence of all of us
Always already there
Forever cycling
And if something someone was/is always already there
Then we are always here.
And since we are going to always be here
Can’t we finally begin a holistic journey
One that returns us to earth's mysterious perfection
Harmony between, humans with nature and all the elements being our lifelong cause
If we can’t make it here
We can’t make it anywhere
Come on think about
A spacecraft heading to someplace better
Our UFO
Everyone baring arms
One temper tantrum bullet later
That UFO
A spot a dot a speck
A flicker of light
Not even visible
Backdropped by a billion stary nighted universes
Gone