If You Like Piña Colada
What words would you use to describe your inner life? Of the above, none.
If It rests at the edge of thought, like glass, uninterrupted.
Or when we feel (in front of others) that we have suffered enough.
Today, I want you to find a way to forego the grammatical structures you’ve been given.
Leave them behind for someone else, like art, a Basquiat; something that is amargado.
And take stock of what is left.
What parts of you have you abandoned? Which do you miss?
This is what whiteness does to the subjectivities of those it seeks to oppress.
It distorts it, turns it into jargon, which is another way to say Philosophy.
– ¡Oye, déjate de sanganaria!
If you like piña colada. (If you do, stop.)
I had an intense desire to undo what undid me and the thing that undid me was the sentence.
A fist full of endocrines. A hepatitis cherry.
My first language was not English, but look how I have mastered it.
from Performance Studies
Write something / worth performing / (something that offers nothing) like MAMI PAPI POW / the inner city’s / subjectivity speaking through the world’s last payphone >> if it rang / would you answer it / the call / to meet one another anywhere else (but here)? [. . .] Although I am of the world, I would not say I am presently in it, therefore, no; an identity that exists only in opposition to everything else, the news, history, el sueño de la lengua, is not sustainable / does not reveal itself / cannot be known / nor do the social deaths we rehearse / gold hoops for $6.99 / “stereotypical” / what leaks out >> coconut oil invective / lube / though we (exc)use it: the advice you gave, the chuleta I ate. Sadly, we displace our affections for one another / always onto someone less deserving / Dígame: how do we know / who we are? When there’s smoke / there’s the way certain bodies congregate / in the museum >> art / the smokescreen >> not sag- resistant / I hope / my doppelgänger drinks / Courvoisier (and not Crown) / to drown / out the way truth is (un)made through language // like “home;” a fiction so – irrelevant / so at home / I felt homesick >> if we could exchange this for something else (not something better / just something else) > we would >> be the wild grass / that comes after / the next ice age >> the life that comes after / we disappear. What you thought was authentic / (someone informs you) isn’t.
