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?