Paul > Recent Status Updates

no work, no pay
she doesn’t miss a day...

Into her body
she sucked the sun,
the soil, into her fingers
her pores,
into her nostrils,
her throat
the white chemical dust
sprayed from the cropduster
into her blood
that ran through her child
who died writhing like a hooked worm.
She did not work
that day.

Displeased,
he docked her pay.
He did not offer
her child’s grave
to be planted in the shade
of his elm.

I meet myself in closets,
amidst heavy soled shoes,
semen soiled underwear, erect trouserflies,
shirtsleeves pinned on hangers.
You open doors, spilling my secrets into the day.
We share rituals that save us from madness.
I walk toward myself
and dance in the circle of your light,
the warmth of your fire
I hear the familiar chant
and smell the essential same sea
I press you to my heart and hear the beat
which is mine

borders
telling us..
to serve
to exist
to call ourselves
to die
borders
with guards
trigger-happy
shoot to kill
don’t cross back
to the motherland
don’t know your roots
confused by the terms
building borders in your mind
it’s not Hispanic
it’s not Spanish
it’s not Latino
it’s the Mexican blood
the Indian blood
that has been drained
into the land
the home
of my heart
my ancestors
my roots
my soul that knows
no borders

If you leave your lover
to run to the market
for bread and pears
you might return
to find your lover
gone and the bed
covered with knives,
hot and gleaming from
a morning in the sun.
If you leave your country
in the wrong hands,
you might return to
see it swimming in blood,
able to spit
but not to speak.

What must we do now
to create peace in our world?
Live beyond borders.

One day though
a stranger arrived
sat down at our table
drank our wine
ate our bread
raped our women
burnt our village
then declared me illegal.
The color of my skin
the language on my tongue
the god that I chose to believe in
demonized in order to justify their cruelty.
The freedom that I enjoyed
my right to self-determination
gone, victim to yet another
military occupation.
My peace,
simply a broken olive branch

The Border
A bigger than life fantasy
An evil maze
An incredible monstrosity
A deadly lie
A creation of sanctified hallucinations
The Border
An imaginary line
Born of death and fed on misery
This poisonous nightmare
Armed and held up by a mountain of greed
Just a modern-day noose of unlimited hypocrisy
And cruel trickery
The Border
A hole full of soul-stealing stupidity
A mansion created by thievery

Today I think: without rage, love is helpless. We are not yet
angry enough. Not yet bitter enough. I look at the paper with
its headlines as black as vultures and its old bad news. The
disappeared, like ghosts of the shine on their rulers’ boots. My
bread tastes like sand. I finish my coffee and try to forget
what I know. The woman of whom we are portions has not yet
demanded justice.

Freedom confuses us; absence of freedom destroys us.
Violence in the hand, stupidity in the mind.
Hatred of others is a knife at your own heart.
Tolerance of others is dinner with your mother once a week.
Love of others is the jackpot, the quarter in the slot, the bank
balances pouring over your hands.
Join the army, travel to exotic places, meet interesting new
people and kill them.
Is it right to kill people? No,

It is written that he was meek,
That he was a great teacher,
Moshe rabbenu. Lies. A brutal joke.
Crazy as a bedbug
Would be more like it.
He never saw God.
He hallucinated that screaming zero,
That noisy hole, it lived nowhere, it was a
Mass hallucination. Not
Even the first item did
He understand of what
People need: law and order,
Rules and regulations, something
To touch, something solid, a
Little bit of peace

With a rule of law composed by God instead of a king. A nation without a king. With stress on social justice; commandments of generosity to
the poor; periodic release of debts and slaves; periodic release
of the land, which it is understood belongs to God, not to
human beings, so that all “private property” is temporary.

Child of compassion, child of wrath. Moses is Egyptian, he is
Hebrew, he is both/neither, he is insider/outsider, he is compressed/torn. Child of the mothers in the world of the fathers. He is the locus of gain/loss, he is where another division begins. Between the God of the universe and the God of a tribe, between inclusion and exclusion, between the imperative of liberty and the imperative of law, explodes Moses.