What is strength?

What is strength?
To look inside the self
where there is a gap
between happiness
and what I'm leading my life for.

Contradictions
displacement
like lands being slipped from underneath
due to programming
seeking something
more than I have

and I've scratched this now
Dug up this present
in order to build a ladder
out of what I know
to be in that bright white
called success
out of this ghetto.

But little do I know
I've dug up the bones of my ancestors
and their fragments litter homelands
so that their spirits haunt our bodies
stealing our spirits
so we are empty and epileptic
Because we have left them
empty and desecrated
They died the same deaths
we do now
But at faster rates
And they do this haunting
because they guard us from the graves
Wanting us to wake up
from the dream
of disconnection

Piko, pusod, puseg, the gut
Umbilical that connected us
As we traversed the place
we now call Pacific
We sailed from island to island
trusting our intuition
that by reading the currents
the language of birds
the talk of the water
the eyes of the stars and the sun
we would find our way
trust that each lifetime
is just a step toward something
And our ability to remember
is what lives on
in collective memories that generate
layers on a spinning wheel
thrown out as seeds
from the center.
We floated, landed and dug deep our roots
in different worlds
connecting them
with invisible connections
piko, pusod, puseg, this gut

What is strength?
But to remember that which has been severed.
To study the wounds of the cut
and understand the ridges of the knife
the tear of the flesh
to understand their weapons
so we may come back with our own healing
to ensure that weapon no longer exists.
To teach future generations
medicine of our own knowledge
that sense
to be reconnected
to our insides, because it is our compass
To determine the journey
into what is made black
what is made bleeding
what is made fearful

That is the strength
to feel the burning in one's heart
that it ignites the eyes to tears
To express that something has gone imbalanced
And that you have a medicine for it.

That is strength.

Report Back from Turtle Island

The land called Aztlan
the land of many tribes
Genocide by the whitened settler,
soldier
Many men taught to see the land
and body
as objects
scalped, raped the people
of the land
called Aztlan
the land of many tribes
who named their place
by listening to the geography
of her
in the mountain of silent strength
in the gurgle of the river
in the whisper of the wind
in the tears of the rain

Rightly so,
they cried and still do
when scalps and bodies
named by those
who saw worth in medallion coins
buy and sell according to the names
of those engraved
on coins and dollar bills
the priests of the church
called Bank
Genealogy trace to London, Paris, Lisboa
Centers of western nations
that bought and sold
Aztlan, and many named lands from
Spanish, French, Dutch, English
Birthed a memory of empty white soul
to be a broker who bought and sold
islands of Philippines, Guam, Puerto rico, Samoa
because of arrogance of blank faces
sold their color for shillings.
that monetary wealth brings
the nerve to steal this land
called Ka Pae Aina o Hawaii Nei
This land called Ka Pae Aina o Hawaii Nei

You think the past is in the past?
Well what you think
when this land crawling with empty bodies hungry
equate bodies and lands
according to how much money they make
for holes in pockets
festering soul wound black like the Gulf.
Try to teach children of Aztlan
the land of many names
the lands of people across the sea
bleeding
taught to worship their God in the church called Bank
We only literate in the texts of dollar bills and coins
To numb our bodies raped ancestor cell, spirit,
Trail behind us as we walk like cattle on conveyer belt
toward the machine called war
machine called tourism
machine called empire
Selling your skulls and bodies according to dollar bills and coins
Our bodies working to the old and new plantation
Brown people of the land
Brown people of the sea
Wake up
Tell me, how you get free?

In dig in us

I remember you
But do you remember me?
I admit
that I only knew
when I read the text of you
submitted under the iron fist
of conquistadors
who you thought was a god returned
from the place you assumed
but he had changed
he swallowed bodies
and spit up regurgitation
of your bones, your flesh, your thoughts
into the likeness of his order
and that is how i read you
that is how i remember you.

brown girl
indigenous face
fuckable body
but not loveable enough
to struggle
cause i walk in museums,
archives, libraries
looking for ways to build a bridge
to the memory i have
to the memory you have
cause i remember

there was a ship
and i was a slave
brown girl
indigenous face
fuckable body
but not loveable enough
to spare me
as warriors saw me
as traitor
and as the battle ensued
you did not see me
but only as shattered porcelain
taken off the galleon
and decayed upon
acapulco shores.

how come
when we fight
through the words
of our masters
we can only remember
the time when they
demarcated our identities
according to our skin tones
the shape of our nose
the slant of our eyes?

how come
when we fight
through the words
of our masters
the value of our spit and speech
is commodified
to the amount of people
we gather as we bank knowledge
into the empty vessels of
masses' minds?

how come
when we fight
through the words
of our masters
you do not hear
the words of sisters and children
who speak in silence
who speak in the language
of bodies that cower
of bodies that shake
underneath the power
of brothers who want to invoke
power of warriors
who protected borders
when across those borders
once you sold bodies
of women, feathers, slaves, gold,
for iron, power, canon, and dreams
of empire
yourself.

i remember you
but do you remember me?
brown girl
indigenous face
fuckable body
asian eyes
but speak spanish
black hair
kinky at the ends
where do I come from?
from the sperm of conquistodors
that splattered across
manila acapulco terrain
ejaculated
swallowed
like blood
when fist hits mouth
silenced by
mestizo hands
of husband, father, brother, uncle
silenced as emasculated
commodified power
empowers you
into de-emasculated poverty
rape the body
to control some kind of terrain again
to enter into lands you have been forbidden
because you are brown
indigenous face
traces of ancestors fucked
by capital wielding conquistadors
injected into minds
to inject their penises
into local lands.
impregnate and forced birth
of monumental histories
to feed so called
empty hungry minds
like the land we have forgotten
has a voice
has a mind
has a way of speaking
although it is silent
like languages of women and children.

sovereignty

sovereignty
born somewhere absent of ancestry
but only in my nationalist mind
where i constrict pre-colonial globalization
to the confines
of eurocentric carving up of the face of the earth
southeast asia, is beneath east asia,
micronesia, melanesia, polynesia
racialized groupings according to skin tones
judged by racist standards of euro american industrialists,
missionaries that drink the blood of savages
as vampires sent down from apocalyptic planets.

sovereignty
i seek to self-determine the mystery
of who my ancestors were
navigators, tattooed, marauding, pirates,
lovers, writers, spoken word orators,
who read the ocean like text
who read the birds like song
who read the clouds like film
who read one another like dance
literate in the manifesting of life
yet betrayed by those amazed
at our intellectual riches
desire for empire through bartered iron
sold bodies of slaves and women
yet our visions undocumented
as not worthy: pagan
in the minds of hordes coming from
baroque cathedrals
stifled magic into the dark tortured souls
where scientific categories
sliced and fragmented beauty
in patriarchal chambers

sovereignty
daughter of migrants
deterritorialized identity
that follows like an umbilical
severed,
but as it laid in the dry soil
tears of lonesome grandfather
sprouted lineage in plantation field
and so we began as diaspora
settler, laborer, invader, dreamer, builder
people of the daga
people of the soil
weaving sugar cane stalks with machetes
upon lands of kanaka maoli
whose ghosts roam with measles and
small pox,
and together, we meet
as christianlized heathens
yet we see the soil as life
all we have.
we have this burning memory of pain
but afraid to explain
cause what will the other think?
when we expose our complicit relation
to that which uprooted us?

sovereignty
my love of land
cannot be bound
like my love for you
who dwells everywhere.
in everyone
only if we could always
be in the state of mind
where we re-imagine what it means
to be our own, but in relation
to each other.
not confined to dominant categories
not confined to agendas of someone else's dreams
but realize our ability to manifest reality.