The Music of an Alternate Me

When thinking of music to which I wish I’d been conceived, I’d like to imagine my parents huddled in the backseat of my old man’s car, doing the deed to bands like The Animals, Dylan, Hendrix, better yet, James Brown.

Me being that funky little seed, soul-dancing against young love’s rushed and anxious current, my own little Mr. Dynamite, climbing the Billboard Hot 100 Chart of conception with all my stripped-down interlocking life rhythms perfectly timed and tuned with my mama’s ever-bopping Janis Joplin heart.

Another Me, Another Life

When I consider an alternate me in a parallel universe, I envision someone not hogtied by the occasional bouts of mortal confusion.

One who’s never been held up by a gun, or rear-ended by a truck.

A me without holes in the heart caused by loss or recklessness.

A me that can easily fold all the seven seas into a one-ocean origami while correctly repairing a haywire psychic TV.

Someone that can play guitar like Robert Johnson at the crossroads.

Someone that can speak French and Spanish like they’re flowers blooming from the mouth,

rather than sounding like I’m trying to give a tourist directions to Hollywood Boulevard while wearing a facemask.

The Moon is Never What You Thought it Was

Our world wobbles on its human-made axis of insanity and is always one blindfolded step from ruin:

pandemics, poverty, wars, and racism.

Countless beings wail in the key of pain, unable to retune themselves to ease.

Certain nights, the moon is just a trick of light;

one evening, it resembles a diamond, the next night, a dagger.

And so we strive to become one another’s steady shine,

through light and dark, rise and fall, song and smoke.

Assassin’s Creed

He was born with a sniper’s scope for a third eye.

He wore the slimy skin of a greed monster. He recited the alphabet of antagonism forwards and backward.

He spoke many languages: hate, treason, fear-mongering.

He sold his soul at the crossroads in exchange for his name in lights. He penned the Book of Deception.

Pilfered reality of its credibility. Sweated dirty money, cut his teeth on the crushed dreams of the beguiled.

With one hand, he grabbed women, with the other he fashioned neckties into lynching ropes.

He courted enmity, built walls to ward off diversity.

He then gathered his followers, began rebuilding America in his image.

Find Something New

If you’re among the 18 million unemployed, our White House tells you to simply “find something new.“

Perhaps you can use this time to become a new person, a renaissance man, a reinvented woman.

Maybe invest in a camera or TV, start your own production company.

Perhaps you can be a man on TV or a woman in front of or behind a camera.

Maybe get a sex change from a woman to a man, or a man to a woman, become a happier person.

Or perhaps you’re that person with a camera, filming a man assaulting a woman; your footage goes on TV, makes you millions.

Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

Waking the Dead

What I don’t know is most everything outside my door.

Those secrets sound like crow song in their more mystical moments.

In their more nightmarish—like an ongoing car alarm, my sonic and savage umbilical cord connected to a ripped-off world.

The word quarantine comes from the Italian quaranta giorni, literally a space of forty days where plague-ridden ships were kept from shore to assure no latent cases were aboard.

In this isolated room, all I know for sure is that I have trouble sleeping at night.

That is why I’m apologizing for anything I may have said that doesn’t make sense.

Then again, I may have already said that without having said it.

This Loving Storm

The flesh of our past still feels kisses even when the flesh of our present is stuck alone in quarantine.

Kisses that have fallen across our lips like summer rains; a dazzling sweetness welling up; a bright filament kindling and rekindling kindnesses and cupidities.

These kisses tattooing the flesh of our past yet recalled in the present—

butterfly kisses fluttering across forehead, cheeks, and eyelids.

Kisses tasting of booze, weed, Binaca, or our natural birth-given breath.

Mouth against mouth. Lips pressed to flesh.

Spark, flash, lightning—

this loving storm rising up from the past, pouring into us, shaking us awake.

Reminding us that we, too, are a part of someone else’s storm.

When the Struggle Calls Our Bones Its Own

All the germs, prayers, and graces bouncing off buildings, scattering through air, entering our permeable and impressionable human bodies;

how the music and madness, the sickness and serenity of it all are a part of us.

How the knife-wielding vagrant on the street corner, and the hopeful onlooker in the nosebleed section of positive societal change are a part of us.

How the taste of one another’s sweat and tears is in the back of our mouths, the odd taste we can’t fully describe, yet know is a part of our own struggle.

How all the damaged yet dazzling wings hanging from the phone lines belong to us.

How the morning bird outside our window is a part of us.

We’re singing its song now.

another early morning bangs on our door

it comes bearing no love, no tears, no walking papers or morning paper.

has bags under its eyes that never get unpacked.

cares zero about us getting forty winks. slaughters slumberland with glee.

offers us a tombstone pillow and black-hole mattress. its bones are diving rods for insomnia. its teeth, filled with cavities of depravities.

doesn’t care how we feel now that our immediate plans have been burned to ash.

the last word some speak are the first words on its mind.

and so it keeps banging on our door. another early morning coming down.

America, the Freebird

Now, more than ever, America feels like the prom date that’s gotten totally wasted, and is spending the whole party sick in the john, leaving the rest of us by the bandstand, mirror balls spinning above our heads, scattering shards of shattered light across our face masks and crumpled quarantine attire, wondering when the band will, ironically or not, play “Freebird” and light up these purple mountains and amber waves of grain with enough electricity to shred the heaviness from our bones and make us feel light enough to walk on water.