To Skate On Sun

blackacrylic:

23.01.11

I had a really interesting discussion about identity, self hate, cultural capital etc with my BFF today and it got me thinking of Margaret Bowland’s selection of paintings of young black girls in white face. When asked to comment on ‘Kenyetta and Brianna’ Bowland that ‘It is a commentary on how women still have to jump through all these hoops to be desirable. These girls are still visible beneath all those layers of crap … they’re still looking back at you.’ I think that a lot of black girls looking at Bowland’s paintings would say that the metaphor transcends beyond the art world. For many black girls Bowland’s paintings are a life metaphor - reflecting a reality where black girls are often marginalised by European standards of beauty. I agree with Cherise Kramarae when she states that ‘For women of color who are viewers, trying to achieve idealised femininity entails not only adjusting or refining one’s body, but also rejecting one’s identity and certain characteristics altogether. To resist this artificial standard is to stand apart from beauty as defined by society’. The frustrating thing for me is that even if you put the fact that there is very little aesthetic diversity across all media platforms to the side, in the black community we impose European standards of beauty on each other with a vengeance. It’s black men that make fun of Alek Wek and it’s black girls arguing about natural hair v relaxer/weave war (e.g ‘These little nappy headed hoes need a terminator’ - Nicki Minaj) etc. It’s this infighting that is the real tragedy.

Somebody told a lie and we believed it.

(via amantesuntamentes)

terrytorro:

Beautiful Picture

(via atreegrowsinbrixton)

Someone told me
That this is my night to be redemptive
Like the scream of a thunderstorm in my fists
Is supposed to tell a story
Beyond the ones my lips can convey here.

All I ask
Is for the peace of this page
To speak with me.
An adlib, perhaps
I am fine with being mimicked,
As long as it whispers
The space between the bomb and the cry
Before the story is put on pause.

They tell me that a good woman,
Is re-written into her hair.
That she leaves it nappy,
That she stays still
while a man
Fumbles the quake of his fingers into her scalp.
They tell me,
That he is to search for urchins of soliloquy.
That the way he works his hands out of these coils,
However,
Is how she should measure his persistence.
If it does not hurt,
If there is no sharp
weave of violence singeing at the base of her neck,
then he does not belong in her tendrils.

Contrarily,
He belongs between her legs.

My hair is straight.
It tickles the part of my back,
Where my spine would fold.
Nothing testing or trialing about my scalp,
It does simple things.
It fights with the wind, sometimes.
It’s never really unruly,
I can’t trap any men here;
They follow me at night sometimes.
They ask me about my hair.
Ask me if they can touch it, if they can
Touch me.

I revel in how foolish they are.
I’m not the girl who lets men into herself,
I give myself to the woman
With fingers like birthdays
Who speaks of herself in third person
Because she knows what kind pen
She can un-write herself with.

I never really feel large enough to hug myself.
I’m never small enough to be anyone’s secret.
I am not my aunt’s definition of a good woman;
To her,
I am uppity,
Far too sure of myself.
Too smug to let my hair become the playground
Of a man who will watch all of it fall out
In the swell of childbirth
And old age.

In complete disobedience,
I tuck myself into the pocket of my next girlfriend.
And there may be 12 more of those,
15 of those
If it is my choice, between the now
Or the tomorrow of my womanhood.
And each one will walk away,
With a strand of my loose flailing hair,
Woven into a cuff of their winter sweaters.

I will never worry of being forgotten,
Or preserved.
I will be a memoir of sorts,
The simplicity of me,
Traveling in parts.
These are the parts of me
That don’t mind pausing.

I don’t miss your hands
I don’t miss the way you used to hold me like you know something about my skin
That I don’t.

We were never suitcase lovers.
Never packed up or well folded.
I always honored the flood of you
Loved the way 
your back mapped my sound like I were unraveled vinyl.
Sounded too much like the rip of lover’s lullaby.
I am no one’s baby.

Except for a while,
You held my hand like I was yours.
A deformation of your fallopian tubes.
The indent we make in your bed,
Infantile and childlike.
The way I cup your breasts,
Like my lungs are screaming for something to break me.

You were more than what I asked for. 
A classroom full of stares;
Like they all know that this A plus isn’t for knowing
The difference between Hiroshima
And suicide bombs.
A woman nine years my senior,
This teacher/student cliché taken a little further than
Dusty backdrops in a dark room.

I can’t trust smiles from women like you.
Not when there’s a one way ticket
Stashed in your hair.
A zip-lock of something childhood couldn’t give either of us.
Like Christmas dinners,
And snow days,
And successful weight loss diets.

There’s a whisper in me that knows what it’s like
To rip fingerprints from wrist and bleed 
Like this is my last mourning.
And today I found a picture of you stashed beneath the ricocheting stare
Of a mountain’s back.
Suffocating has never really been my thing
But if it means purging you because I need to
Then here’s the noose
Come drain me.

i remember meeting you
foreign skin and subtle breath 
no breasts 
just yellow chest like you trap the sunlight the way the sky cannot
love you love me not

im sorry that i dont know how to repremand the sin sitting between my thighs 
there is no way to hide us in the night 
look at how bright you are
and how i foolishly tripped you into sunset
God called and asked me for your heart back 
I forgot where I put it

forgive me
for the way i barrier my lips from you
I am simply afraid of being loved all the way through

I remember being the 24th hour
watching you at the peak of midnight 
unsure and willing 
the way you sneak your fingers into pockets of flesh
you dont understand the dangers that lie here
that I am holder broken bullets and tickets to moratoriums
you will find nothing but dead things in the most beautiful of my creases 
I am blood resting on the bottom of a pyramid
impossible and effortless 
you do not need to listen to me breathe another person in my lungs 
there is no space for you here 
in this rusty door hinge i call a heart

for someone who’s so heartbroken 
you would think i could recognize what loves me back
but loves me back means spine
means bending and breaking again
i cant take breaking again
i will break you
thats a promise 

in fact I have before 
and i catch the broken pieces underneath my blood 
when u stare my skin off of my bones
love, 
love me less close the surface of your heart
you need space
I need breathing air
and when I leave
because I will
where will all the sunlight go?

[I can’t express how I feel well, to those of you who want me to talk. So I guess this is what I want to say in a nutshell. I’ll probably hermit for a while.]

Some time ago
A few hours, maybe,
I ripped a Target pillow and my old Barney bear apart.
The insides flew everywhere
And I sat in them.
Just sat there.
Everything white and snowy
Like I screamed some kind of wonderland into appearance.
My mother understood enough to not ask questions,
Understood enough to hide the box cutters,
And the fruit slicers,
And the razors.

The skin of my palms are rough,
From tearing at cotton.
As if this were me, tearing at myself.
Hands
Aren’t meant to break the things that want mending.
Hands
Are only meant to fix the reparable things,
Like a cracked piggy bank,
With elmer’s glue and stickers.

I’m not a cracked piggy bank
I can’t reverse my drama.
Cant reverse the fact that in algebraic terms
I feel less than, never equal to.
A freestyle swim on a treadmill,
Shit like this shouldn’t happen
To people who know where they’re going.

Three 
“sorry, you’re talented but..” letters 
Within three weeks.
Like battle scars aren’t enough to prove that I’m a soldier.
Like sunlight doesn’t bend in windows.
Like stupid sometimes dosen’t teach you enough to want to be smart.
I’ve got a room full of reasons 
Why every single one of these letters is completely rational. 
And I got a chest full of sounds that makes all of it bullshit.
Makes all of this bullshit

Makes me want to start 12 years ago.
Makes me want to tell mommy the first time it happened
Instead of after the 20th time
Before he decided he was done with me, and left.
Makes me want to learn how to be strong for myself
Before I learned how to be strong for everyone else.
I could have saved me first,
Instead of saving all of them.

But when you’re 8,
When you’re scared because mommy’s got a mouth full of opportunity
And you’re scared that a secret
Could fuck it all up for her,
When you don’t wanna see shit go haywire on the outside
Since it’s already Hiroshima bombed on the inside,
It gets hectic.

And then you end up an imploded butterfly 
With the sores that no one wants to touch
Cuz they’re bleeding hurt everywhere.
No one knows how to save you,
So you gotta touch the ground by yourself first
Before your hands can find something solid to push you up with.

I don’t expect a panel of mini-gods,
With a stack of applications to understand
What its like being the kid with nothing left but a flashlight
To touch and feel your way through to the other side.
But you imagine having a kid,
Or being one,
With only two, nearly defective legs to lean on,
And then imagine trying to walk,
Just for someone with better legs than you,
To trip you and dare you to get back up again.
Like you’re not supposed to even think about running.

I’ve been here for so long
With some hope on one arm
And some humility on the other.
I’m not letting go of either.
But I am tired
Of holding on to shit so heavy.

In my pre-calc class,
I watch two red haired girls sleep.
The one 
To the left of me,
Her skin giggles when she breathes.
Her body swells when she inhales
Like an embarrassed lighthouse stuffing herself into the horizon
As if trying to find a baby titanic to save
before it quick sands.

I remember who she is when she’s awake.
She’s all heartthrob stumble.
She speaks like a tripping matchbox,
I find myself expecting firery,
At least even spark,
But only her eyes swelter.
Her lips are pastel and rugged
Like someone has been trying to stuff an explosion down her throat for years.

There’s an untouched worksheet filtering the body oils from beneath her hands;
Something about Sigma and Delta summations.
I know that if she were awake
Her hair would be playing freeze tag with her face.
She’d be shoving her fingers into her scalp
The way a frustrated lover might
If attempting to tug the tension from her cheeks.
She is still bent over,
An envelope with too much beautiful
Still cuffed in manila.
She’s a crushing sentiment,
With too much silent at all the wrong moments.
Sometimes, 
I catch her staring. 
Wonder if she sees anything.

The other red head is on my right.
I don’t really see her much,
But usually
She’s a peeking thunderclap of a goddess
Standing stick straight atop the last Himalayan Mountain.
She’s loud sometimes.
I wanna shut her up sometimes.
But today she’s fumbling with swallows of exuastion
A pregnant feline
Belabored with her own strength.
She dosen’t know this – but she scares me.
Scares me enough
That I won’t ever really tell her to shut up.
Because if she wanted to
She could give my reputation a run for its money in this class.
And I know that she wants to,
Just not enough.
When she’s awake
We meet eyes in a brick housed battleground type of way.

There’s a shrugging scaffold bridging the three of us.
When the red head on my right
picks her head up from the cradle of her arms
looks over at me
and Says “You got the answer to the last equation?”
The other red head is awake, 
And looking over my shoulder
For the answer to the same equation.
I hunch my back
Like a wilting clover,
Tuck my hands into my jacket
And say “The limit doesn’t exist”.

Let’s lie here
With our backs to the sun
They don’t know of our burning yet
Know nothing of our red skin
And irritated landslides of secrets.
They only know of the way the sky
Will reflect
Off of the least bit of heat that clings to the asphalt.
A glittering of threat
Shouting at us,
Swimming below our feet.
It gets warm down there.
The earth is trying to suck all of its energy
Back into its core.
The center will not abuse itself,
But the ones depending on the center will.

Let the frisk of the wind chime,
Swing with my hair in its palm.
Sometimes,
I’m afraid of what scares me the least.
Afraid of only the things
That I cannot rationalize.
Call me silly and broken for this.
Ghostly and infantile,
I never promised my womanhood to the future,
Only promised
Whatever wisdom being without womanhood 
will bring me.

But lies can be funny,
And the truth can choke the laugh out of you.
In some dream, at some time,
I learned to laugh the laugh out of myself.
Learned how to be humorous enough to catch myself
Crying.
I don’t like crying,
Never been a fan of being face full
Of waterfall.
What a waste of resource
When half of the world is still waiting
To be taught how to feel.

I’m doing my part by saving my tears
For the man who can’t cry for himself;
And I hope I meet him one day.
I hope I meet the man whose emotions 
Are still pent up in his fist.
I hope to crush my sponge tips of hope
Above his wrists.
Watch his hands open up to the sky
Watch the insides of his palms
Burned back brown from all the pale,
Watch the smile on his face hydroplane,
Reflections of the sky.

Shit gets hectic down here
a chest pressed with something you cant swallow
Fine
Spit it at me
Slap it onto my tongue
Show me
What a mother’s rage looks like when it’s impoverished
Broken.
I wanted to be like you
When I was tiny and trying to fill footsteps
That looked a lot like the ones god should’ve left behind
Except there is no god
Cuz gods don’t leave little girls to take care of their mothers
And mothers don’t forget that sometimes there will be
No god to take care of them.
So you tell me
Where does the screaming end here
When keys
Turn lock,
When fists are schizophrenic
When tranquilizer is my face
This space
Is too small for me to breathe
I’m suffocating beneath you
Or above you
Whichever seems symmetric enough
For the dream you’re trying to tease from my tonsils
I’m not subtle enough
To be non woman in a house full of woman
Cant fix myself
Sometimes emotion
Or sometimes nicer than you are
Three degrees
Sit sidesaddle on these walls
Don’t fall
Even when you’re throwing me against them
No one knows
What kind of bullshit we stuff in these corners here
They see
Success story
And a saved trouble teen
You see
Trouble teen saved from herself
Because you’ve never heard a poem about you
Written in between the margins
But this is truth on stilts
Crushing you
Crushing this
In 4 days I will be 18
I cant promise
That on the morning you wake to congratulate me
I’ll be here.
You might just find
My check book gone,
And your keys sitting on the table.
I’m not sure if the adult me can handle something as hazardous
As a broken family
Still cracking at the seems
When I’m still trying to find ways
To keep my rib stitched to my heart beat.

Do you stumble yourself solid?

Do you grip the sides of the tub,

When your cowardice is flailing against current,

Protecting you from bravery,

Brave enough to be swallowed by pity

And translucent oxygen,

Do you think of me then?

Is it suffering

To be a blatant oil spill?

A sullen sound of cowry and beach side

A stroke of star dust brushed from your fist

50,000 strokes

You glitter sometimes.

Eyes

Like mine

Can’t afford to bleed you for a shadow,

Not when the lights are on.

You’ve gotta learn

How to fist yourself into mobile and lighter fluid,

How to catch the flame when it lights for you,

How to be summer

And fall

When the spring will have the energy to catch you.

Stop falling like your heart is some kind of safety net

There is no elasticity to be found

Crotched into your ribcage.

Don’t wanna find you

Open lunged and heaving.

Can’t drown your face

Into another woman’s back,

Can’t fit her spine into your smile, sweetheart

Bravery just doesn’t work like that.

Can’t watercolor the sky if it’s been blushed and bruised already.

Just let it rain the way it will.

When you’re thirsty

There will always be moisture

To weep from.

This song makes me smile and squirm in my seat :) Have you ever heard a song that dosen’t even belong to your generation - and you just wish that you were born ten or fifteen years earlier? That’s what this song does to me.

I will lie to you one day

And you will decide to breathe less of me

Mill your tongue into adobo

The clay will paint my fingers gold

We won’t kiss

the way we had

When we were 15

and swollen behind sand dunes

There will not be enough sun

For pregnant pauses

We will make love

With everything but our hands

You will whisper that the rain

Is filling enough to outshout deception.

I will play the game backwards

Candle held up to the moon

The shadow will double and

Fold in around whatever bed

Will allow us to lay love to its slumber

Every conclusion

Stutters of a scratched track

A song stuck stagnant

On its favorite bridge.

I think we should end this way.

I don’t think people realize how beautiful feminine affection is. More specifically, woman - on - woman affection, lesbianism. I remember being much younger, in my preteens, admiring a lesbian couple from afar while waiting for a friend in a random Starbucks somewhere in Greenwich. I was struck by how sensual their small displays of affection were. A light touch on the back of the neck, or a kiss on the temple - it seemed minuscule but so full of energy. To me, it was and still is art. I think what makes it so beautiful is how sensitive it seems to the eye. We are strong, mentally blustering, yet still princesses (in our own rights). The sinewy shape of women, the softness of our curves, the softness of skin, the opposition in shade of skin. When standing next to another woman, these features seem enhanced. The contrast is complimentary.