What comes out of a mouth empty of
mindful thoughts or heartful chicken noodle soup
home cooked in my mother’s kitchen
where reside warm tingly feelings of
times when I was ten and we went on these
trips along the peninsula. Riding on wings of
childhood imaginations to a land we made reference to
as ‘freedom camp’ sprung from Brazilian soap operas on TV,
our ideas of romanticism and world travels were born from
the seats of our sofa in the rental apartment
behind locked grills we didn’t consider as prison
until I came to the Americas and found out there is
life beyond the iron doors of safety.
Just like, there is more gibberish that comes out
of this mouth, this heart, this body that calls itself me
yet I cannot remember a time when I was so full of junk
waiting to soar out from the seat of a catapult;
I have always been pure from day one when my mother
warned me with a wooden laddle and a bamboo cane
about being too much my unbridled self, bubbling out
from every orifice the disgusting likeness of me,
steam unwilling to let the restraints of high society pin me down
until I held myself down with my own foolish insecurities.
So I could now only murmur gibberish forms of poetry
spilling out like guts into gutters, phlegm into spit pots,
spliff into pot pits, hoping for one more, just one more
intoxicated trip, words as my dope, memories in place of imaginations,
on my solo journey to Freedom Camp in the cavities of my reason,
the spirit of my intellect, the instinct of my soul;
I want to quench my addiction to the liberty of non-sense, and since
mother is no longer holding the spoons and sticks in her hand
I am remembering only of times she had went down on her knees
in front of authorities, of offsprings, of altars, of ego and tradition,
to grant us the immunity only a mother’s love could give.
Thoughts incoherent, jump jumbled like flea on a cat’s neck
asking to find grounds to plant roots in and suck the juices out of
virtuosity, so that my virtues as a woman dry into mudcakes of
morality. Forget about my mother, my infancy, my independence,
ideas have sprung life of their own to dominate this rambling
of emotions on legs skittishly scampering around the cluttered room
searching blindly for an exit, but I have no eyes to see with anymore;
I lost them when I wrote the first line. I see only what I choose to believe
and I no longer recognize the cave where my faith dwells in.
I have built the bars to my own penitentiary
and thrown away the keys
when I ate up the words to my poetry.
