life stories – Diary of the Broken Ballerina

Dearly Forgotten

I didn’t write this for the majority.

I didn’t write this for the generation of entitled personas mimicking the human form.

You know the ones that ridicule you for being different because what the majority says goes- and they created this dystopia where anything that is different is not welcome in this bar, store, school, park, bus, train, sidewalk, church, earth.

I wrote this for the vast generation of have nots.

Those who picked the shorter stick by proxy-

Via decisions that were not of their own-

Decisions chosen by those who chose not to try harder-

Decisions chosen by those who chose to not clear a safe path for us.

I say this with pride- We are the have nots.

We are the ones that were trained to endure walking barefoot- down roads littered with shards of fractured dreams – and promises-

With jagged edges that are inoculated with the past transgressions of others and we suffered from the subsequent wounds that festered deep into our soul-

We were eager to wash away our sins by running to get baptized in muddy water and drinking spoiled grape juice with stale crackers- because the silver lining is not always sparkling, fresh and new.

And we struggled to keep our mind free of gangrene, which is rampant because we have to trudge through the unsanitary conditioning strategies of society- you see-

Decay of the mind starts with the censorship of our thoughts, emotions and truths.

So I urge you to continue to make as much noise as you can-

Our voices in -unison can break many glass ceilings throughout eternity.

This is for the have nots-remember- Losing is never an option

Sangre

Yesterday I drove through a thick, blinding fog.
I hoped it would lead me into a portal that would take me to the places that I visit in my dreams.
The places where unfamiliar faces greet me with familiar smiles and hugs.
Here they remind me that eternity is a real place.
This fog caused me to levitate in memories, and before I knew it –
There I stood.
Lost in my mental Labyrinth, which shape shifts with my emotions-
filled with dark alleyways lined with street lamps with flickering bulbs that hold the pieces of the souls that still continue to guide me with the light of their memory and love.
I soon found myself in a house of mirrors.
As I walked down the forgotten corridors- I started to break every mirror because I didn’t want to see the reflections of me-
Images of my past – the puppet that I used to be.
The wooden girl without a cricket for a conscious- who just wanted to be free.
I painfully stepped on every fractured piece of me – as I remembered that I was
a shattered girl living in a shadow world, trying to hunt for the sun- barefoot on hot city concrete, standing in line waiting to get baptized in the river of illegally open fire hydrants- which was the only time I felt relief.
I always watched where the water went as it trickled down the grates into the belly of the beast.
Wondering if it all ends up in the same place that the blood went when it spilled onto the city streets?
I was the forgotten Tarzan, a child raised by sewer rats, swinging through life’s jungle holding on for dear life to the lines from discarded children’s bibles and National Geographic magazines that I saved from trash piles and used them to build paper houses for me to hide in, while I treated my wounds alone.
Lifes lessons built a warrior like no other.
I am a walking, talking enigma.
My soul is grotesquely disfigured with scars and missing parts, but the one thing that was never touched was my heart.
My blood type is the rarest of them all, not A , not B, Not AB, not O-
It is light, it is heat, it is energy, it is unapologetically me.
When I get hit by the fists of life, this rare emulsion flows freely from my busted lip and bleeding nose onto paper – and dries into fragments that form love notes from my soul reminding you and I that anything can be conquered with love.

First I Tried to Walk in the Footsteps of My Father (part.2)

There I stood alone.
The younger version of me was still there too.
She sat down, crossed legged in the middle of my fathers timeline and looked up at me and asked-
“When will he come back?”
Five words, as heavy as bricks, thrown at me
by my own innocence.
They knocked me off course and of course-
I knew the answer, but did I want to disappoint myself again?
Then I remembered.
The superpower that all children have is hope.
In the middle of distress-
In the middle of nowhere or nothing-
In the middle of this burning forest-
A child can sit and still see the possibility of something re-emerging, alive, from fire and ashes.
She asked me again, this time pulling my left hand harder, “When will he come back?”
I stood her up gently and said, “When people lose their path ,sometimes it’s better that they start off at a new point, a place that was different from where they went off track to begin with. I can’t tell you exactly when, but I know where you can find him again.”
I pointed in the opposite direction of the road towards the future.
Her eyes – were so bright.
So, Bright.
Illuminated with love, hope, dreams- so innocent-
And for a moment, just a moment – I remembered seeing through them.
I remembered how differently the world looked.
My senses were heightened.
I could hear the beauty in life’s chaos.
Despair was a symphony of violins playing in B minor, weeping in unison carrying away tears, pain and prayers to the clouds.
The cracks in the sidewalks were strings on a blues guitar and the footsteps of the crowd played a mix of polyrhythmic jazz octaves , sometimes in A minor-
and I was enamored by it all.
I remembered me.
I hugged my youth , I hugged her and watched as she melted into me.
I had locked her out and there she was- just patiently waiting to return to me.
I was so lost in my thoughts that it took me a while to notice someone was watching from afar.
I walked towards the figure only to be stopped by large pieces of glass in the road.
I had to carefully step in between the pieces of dangerous debris, I had to climb through bushes with sharp thorns.
I thought to myself this road was not meant to be traveled and someone tried their best to hide it.
Then I lost my breath after being kicked in the stomach by instinct.
This was the path of my mother.
I was now walking in the footsteps of my mother.
I tried to get to her.
I was bleeding.
I was in pain .
I had to get to her.
She yelled out, “Please , don’t try to come closer! ”.
Three large rows of barbed wire fencing kept me from fully reaching her.
I watched this younger version of my mother as she sat down on the dirt road, hugging her knees to her chest with one arm and burying something with her bare hand.
Her dress was torn, her feet were covered in mud-
Her face looked like it was permanently tattooed with streaks of tears.
The more she wiped her face, the more streaks would appear and her tears were invisible.
I dropped to my knees and said – “Don’t you want to be free?”
She looked at me and said, “I was left here on purpose. I had to hide in order to survive. I am almost finished burying my feelings, because I don’t want to hurt anymore. This is the only way that I can make it through that path that you just came from.”
I got so mad.
I stood up and yelled-, “ What about love? How are you going to love, how are you going to care- if you keep it all buried here?”
She replied, “Love hurts! Love hurt me. My father hurt me. This world hurts. Nothing is safe.”
I yelled back,” Then you will just hurt others. You will hurt the ones that don’t deserve it. You will destroy your own flesh and blood.”
She stood up and grabbed the barbed wire fence with both of hands and then she showed her palms to me.
There was no blood.
Not one drop.
She said, “ Everything was taken from me, down to the blood that ran in my veins.”
She stared at me in silence and then said,” You look like me , you remind me of someone I saw in the mirror many,many years ago. You look like someone I should know, and if this is so- Please make sure that the curse of this path stops with you. You came from that direction so you know what part of me is left.”
With tears in my eyes I watched her fade into the burning forest.
In a rage I screamed out all the pain I endured for years and years.
It echoed through the burning forest and blew out all of the flames.
Engulfed in all the smoke, I just stood there and cried, because for the first time I understood that my path was my own and It was a path that I was meant to travel alone.
As I approached the start of my path, a woman stood before me.
She was an elder spirit that I only saw from time to time in my dreams.
Her form changes but the warmth in her eyes and smile are always the same.
She put her hand on my shoulder and pointed to the sky and said – child, this is where you came from.
First, I heard the devil betting god and all the other angels that I would not succeed and then
I watched these beautiful beings conversate while they crafted me with the stars.
They said we won’t give her regular eyes of man- we will give her the eyes of a guardian angel.
This way she will always see the beauty in the rough and the love in the swap of hate and hope hidden under despair.
We will gift her the power of an imagination that never dulls even as she ages. She will be special, she will be strong and she will carry the messages that need to be heard and felt by the souls of all those in need.
And I saw this light pass on to me in the womb and I watched my body form and my heart beating and my first cry when I was born.
I continued to walk down my timeline and the memory of the beatings I endured didn’t hurt as much, and the verbal abuse daming my existence didn’t cut as deep.
Because now I understood my purpose was never to suffer , my purpose was to shed light and conquer the darkness.
And I only know this because first I had to walk in the footprints of my father.

Gifts from the Uninvited

A poet’s words are the unexpected visitors that arrive without notice.
The poet’s words are intruders of the soul.
They find their way up and over the walls we build, walls that we think can’t be breached.
They break the locks on the gates that we secured with chains that we think can’t ever be broken.
They ring the doorbell- they bang on the windows and whisper- “I know you hear me.”
Knock.
“Let me in.”
Knock! Knock!
“I know you are there!”
Knock! Knock! Knock!
Eventually we have to deal with the flood from our inner wishing wells-
Which regurgitate after choking on the bones of reality and spew out long forgotten thoughts, prayers, emotions, memories-
and the people around us can’t see we are constantly drowning.
Poets are constantly drenched in the ink that oozes from our mind.
We dry off by rolling around on paper which soaks up and reveals the vulnerable parts of us.
I was standing ankle deep in my thoughts, playing catch with my son,
when I realized that I was playing catch with myself.
I tried to step back- out of the thought –
but I lost my footing and fell in with my head barely hovering above the surface.
Then I heard my soul say-
He is a transposed, better version of you.
I then realized that I am playing catch with the innocence that I lost a long time ago.
An innocence that I had forgotten about, and here it stands right in front of me .
His laughter was the laughter that my soul had forgotten about.
His laughter awoke my soul and she broke through the brick wall of my consciousness and took a front row seat to see.
I just continued to tread in these beautiful thoughts as I watched a part of my soul reliving the beautiful youth that was not afforded to her.
You see, a poet’s words are the unexpected visitors that arrive without notice.
The poet’s words are the souls intruders.
Getting through the walls we build that we think can’t be penetrated.
Breaking the locks on the gates that we secured with chains that we think can’t ever be broken.
So when you hear them knocking, let them in, invite them to the table and take the time to hear what they have to say.

First I Tried to Walk in the Footsteps of My Father (Part One)

I had to ingest a few extra ibuprofen, with hopes that my words would be less inflammatory-

then my spirit whispered go ahead and chase them down with that leftover coquito mixed with your cup of coffee.

My tortured soul knew that when the liquid truth is caffeinated- it would help me feel warmer in this cold realm, speak clearer and see better –

because this journey is perilous but necessary to help me find myself and for me to understand you and for you to understand others.

So, I walked and walked – backwards down my timeline until I started to smell smoke, and my instinct told me that I would soon find the path of my parents.

I had to stop when I saw the five-year-old version of me screaming at the side of the road.

The forest is on fire!

The forest is on fire and it’s destroying all of our family trees!

These strange flames burn from the roots up.

Some of our culture was born from slash and burn agriculture, which is supposed to cultivate the land for planting trees with strong roots instead it proliferated fields and fields of deferred dreams which sprouted an invasive species of long-double stemmed plants.

I am the direct descendent of weeds that flowered like dandelions, and when the winds of fate pursed her lips together and blew –

their cotton ball seeds became windborne and settled between concrete slabs and eventually they germinated me.

I continued on until I came upon a forked path.

On the left, I saw a younger version of my father opening up a pack of Marlboros and he didn’t recognize me as his daughter.

He said, “Hey you look like someone I should know.” and he asked me for a light.

We both laughed at his joke, as we were surrounded by fire, and he lit the cigarette from glowing embers in the atmosphere.

I could tell that’s where my humor and sarcasm came from.

I asked, “Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and accompany me on this walk?”

He walked to the rhythm of salsa music and I loved hearing him talk.

My father’s family migrated to New York from Puerto Rico.

My father never knew his father and my father’s mother was his grandmother because his mother was a young woman who was still trying to figure out life with 5 kids and counting before the age of 29.

And when his grandmother passed, my father said life became a blur of different city skylines visualized from the seat of L train rides as he traveled from a Brooklyn sofa to Brooklyn couch using a plastic bag from the bodega as his luggage carrier on a week-to-week basis- never knowing what to expect next.

I saw him beginning to fade and I grabbed his arm and I asked him, “If you had a daughter what would you name her?”

He took one last, long drag from his cigarette and flicked the butt to the ground-

and the smile that spread across his face infiltrated my heart and the parts that were stone started to soften-

He said,” I will name her Mariana. Mariana Soto- Mari for Mother Mary-Mother of Souls and Ana for the name of the women that I loved and whose heart I broke.”

And he faded away, lost in the burning forest of addiction for 20 years.

“Ana” is not the name of my mother and I am okay with that.

He named me after the true desire in his heart and when he looked at me, he saw the purity that he lost.

In the quest to understand me, I had to understand where I came from.

So, first I tried to walk in the footsteps of my father.

The Opening of My Unfinished Thesis

If science is defined as the study of behavior of the physical and natural world through observation -and
If science is defined as experimentation and testing of theories against evidence obtained-
Then I will argue that poetry is science –
And that would make all poets scientists.
Our inquisitive minds evolved from a single cell in Africa-mitochondrial Eve and the metaphysical teachings of life molded us into these unique beings.
The wiring of our minds is an intricate web of neurotransmitters sending signals via delicate, silk threads, synapses fueled by passions for the spoken word- which propagate hypothesis about humanity in subliminal waves.
We are theorists who proudly write our thesis on the back of napkins and crumpled CVS receipts because these observations of human exchange must be captured, documented and told, before they are forgotten.
You see we poets- are experts in qualitative research- as we are always studying the nature of phenomena and not just the number of occurrences.
Phenomena – defined as a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen- and a poets scripture captures that better that any lens.
We use metaphors the same way scientist work with cells and atoms.
With our words we construct models of the way the world should be and we make replicas of the destruction caused by man for the world to see.
And like a mad scientist- I discovered how to make inanimate objects like the bathroom walls talk as I recite my poems the walls echo my thoughts and reminds me that I am still alive.
So again, If science is defined as the study of behavior of the physical and natural world through observation-and
If science is defined as experimentation and testing of theories against evidence obtained-
Then my hypothesis is true- Poetry is science and us poets are all scientists.

My lost valedictorian speech

This year I had to tell a lot of people,
Please do not mistake my smile for niceness.
Sometimes, I am offensive purposefully, but always respectfully.
You see at one point in my life I forgot my name and I lost my human form .
I had transformed into an empty, reused pill bottle- shuffled from different pockets to night stands-there I stood on display-
burdened with layers upon layers of handwritten labels glued to my skin-
like the stickers that I studied on the walls of after-hours hole in the wall bathroom stalls- while trying to regain my balance from deliberate intoxication –
I digress-
My labels read-
“angry, emotional, ashamed, lost, vulnerable, victim, lonely, broken.”
I was a walking billboard.
And if you took the time to look close-
My small print read “do not leave out in direct sunlight – if exposed too long to peoples bullshit- may exhibit moments of irrational thinking and her verbal outbursts may cause permanent brain damage to others”.
So beware, my words are weapons that I wield well.
I suffered from untreated mental lordosis, hell bent on trying to navigate the uneven, concrete sidewalks of my life with my head in the clouds-
I was destined for damage because I tripped and fell a lot.
I’m warning you.
I am not nice.
I haven’t been nice since I was in utero, cushioned from this cold world by amniotic fluid which thankfully blurred my vision at birth-
Because my recycled soul was gifted to a baby born in a Brooklyn gutter –
Never swaddled by a loving mother.
Nature nurtured me.
I had to learn how to walk by holding on to the devil’s pinky finger-
So you can imagine my trust issues.
And my godmother was fate.
She lovingly nicknamed me little 80/20 because she knew the odds were not supposed to be in my favor.
Please forgive my bluntness.
You see where I’m from, being nice made you a bleeding target for famished wolves and fresh meat for the butcher- blocks of predators forced me to learn to be a hunter because I was tired of being preyed upon.
And praying only took the edge off and helped a little.
What a rat race that I ran well.
My faith was displaced into extracurricular activities which awarded me medals for first place in the category of heartache.
My headaches were endless.
I suffered from severe congestion-leading to perpetual mental infections- as I was desperately trying to heal the spiritual abscesses left from untreated metaphysical trauma- that caused wounds to fester until I almost became a victim of self inflicted sepsis.
It’s a miracle I survived.
A wise man once told me to always pronounce your s’s and your t’s.
and that is some Shit that I try to live by daily.
Enunciate, enunciate ,enunciate.
Paint pictures with your words.
This world is a canvas that needs our graffiti desperately.
Illicit art that helps elicit the emotions of the soul.
I wanted to share a great recipe that everyone should try for the new year.
All you need is two middle fingers and then you blend them in with a lot of fuck being nice spice.

I humbly accept this award.

Thank you.

Long Time No See

The ink in my pen ran out a long time ago.

Now I transcribe each noun, adjective and verb with my own blood.

The paper soaks up my pain and transforms it into riddles of similes and metaphors-

A confusion of emotions.

Confusion is what creates chaos, and you need chaos to invoke a revolution- and revolution is the never ending fight for the survival of our identity.

Sometimes I am afraid to write, because when my creative ports open, the unstoppable flood gates spills truths that drown others and I become an accessory to murder.

Turbulent waves- rip tides of secrets and painful memories seep into the fibers of lined paper and feed hidden seeds that sprout the language of the soul- a poem.

I stopped writing for a long time because when I do- I can feel my poorly healed scars start to dehisce and the pain taunts me as it bangs against the bars of my caged heart and the fallen angel that lives within me starts screaming to speak.

Mute.

You can only press the button but so many times before it breaks and your only choice is to listen and turn the volume up.

What is your soul saying?

I used to wear my heart on my sleeve but it kept getting impaled by flying debris from the tornados of fate-

But still I moved forward-

And when the barbed wire from the fences of life kept nicking my skin-

I still fought to progress-

and I had to jump so damn high to surmount the hurdles of trials and tribulations, hurdles which at times bruised my shins- over and over again

-but I still staggered on.

Wading through various cesspools of shitty circumstances, trying to stop and smell the roses proved to be challenging- yet still possible.

People just don’t understand that when home becomes hell the streets become heaven.

I’m sure that I’ve shared a drink and ate dinner with the devil many times.

I gambled it all away to the point where the only thing I had left was half a mustard seed in my back left pocket.

And in a swamp of decay- I was able to use it to grow faith.

And from that small patch of faith I was able to replant hope.

I had to stand tall and blow away the clouds of shame that hung over me in order to let the sun break through.

And man did my forest bloom.

My brain sprouted vines and carried me back to civilization where I continue to strive.

I allowed my face to be smothered with a pillow held by childhood trauma for way too long.

And you know what- it feels good to hear my voice again.

It feels good to be back.

Hello, It’s been a while.