Scaling the Walls

*This was written using a prompt in Writing Club where we were given a phrase and had to write something based around that phrase. My phrase was "scaling the walls".

We spend our whole lives scaling the walls
These walls that confine us
And they just keep building them higher
These walls that remind us
How fucking tiny we are

So you can scale these walls and look up and feel hopeless
Or you can keep looking down as you climb and feel important

Imagine if we all got together and broke these walls down instead
Instead of this steady climbing
But that's just a fantasy in my head

Forget it, every man for himself
Because caring too much is bad for your health

We spend our whole lives scaling these walls
Until we can't hold on any longer and we fall
You'll never climb faster than they can build, you'll never be ahead
But wouldn't they be surprised if we all got together and just broke these goddamn walls down, instead?

Ode to the Summer Rain

*this is a piece that I wrote for a creative writing class, modeled after Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind".

You fall when temperatures rise
Warm and wet, you are sex in disguise
Droplets covering exposed skin look like sweat
This is Summer romance, as good as it gets

Movies create cliches out of trying to capture your magic
It's tragic, but you... you are orgasmic
You turn the pretty into the erotic
You make the natural look exotic

Clear crystals shatter upon a vibrant face
Causing rainbows to appear all over the place
Droplets under brown eyes, look like tears
But all your fears are calmed when her smile appears

But this is now, and that was last year
This is now, and she's no longer here
Her hands are not around, no longer willing, to catch the rain
So Summer rain, now it's your turn to wash away the pain.

In The Sheets

Lay my body down in sheets of white

Lined with blue stripes

Under covers of gray words

The likes of which no one has ever heard

And touch me                                                         

And let me touch you

But you can keep your hands to yourself, I’ll keep my hands by my side

Because hands can only touch the surface, and I’m tryna delve deep inside

Until I find your composition

Your words like apparitions, appear to be visions

Eyes closed and ears open

And in that moment

I’m too far to reach you, but I can grasp your concept

And to be honest

I’ve never felt so close to you

Like your miles away but the ghost of you

Is lips pressed against my ear whispering

Shhhh… are you listening?

It sounds like…. It sounds like poetry

It sounds like every word you’ve ever said to me

Echoing against my ear drums

It sounds like freedom

It sounds like a deep breath

Saying “give me poetry or give me death”

I swear before I ever spoke a word

I was destined to do spoken word

It’s the one thing that makes sense to me

It engulfs up all my sensory

And then there’s you… poetry in human form

A strong, raging beautiful storm

Kiss me, I want to find out if your words are contagious

I wanna write your story on these notebook pages

And if you should tell me your secrets

I’ll write them down and read them

Over and over until I know them by heart

And then tear that little piece of paper apart

So no one else will ever see

I t can just be you and me

Touch me with your thoughts

They say two cents is the cost

But yours are nothing short of priceless

If they think they’re a problem then you must be a crisis

My first vice is poetry, but you can be my next one

See, she’s my right hand, but you can be my left one

The one I hold the mic with

Hold it with a tight grip

And give it just a light kiss

To bless the audiences

Yes, we’ll make love in the sheets

Nah, ya’ll not listening… we’ll make love in the sheets

Conceiving ideas to be held in the womb of my brain

Fed food for thought and eventually developing into spoken words

You are now witnessing… birth

Her name will be something poetic

Something we haven’t quite thought of yet

Her life will tell a story

Of all the poets before me

And you, she will be written in my words and spoken through your voice

So that there will be no other choice

But to listen, and she will be beautiful

Her truth indisputable

She will be the reason I live

And the finished product of the last thing that I’ll ever give

Cause one day I’ll stop writing… yeah, one day I’ll write my last line

And that’ll be about two seconds before I flat line

School Spirit

It’s _:__ * P.M. Do you know where your kids are?

Well these days they never leave their rooms, but do you know where our kids are?

Stuck in between the channels, caught in a world wide web, living in an alternate reality

Have we taught them the value of family?

Do we value their humanity?

Are we teaching them?

No, I don’t mean spewing out lessons. I mean… are we reaching them?

They say the youth of today is lost. I say who gave them those directions?

Are we busy giving answers when we should be asking questions?

Do you know where our kids are? Can they learn from you?

When it all gets to be too much, can they turn to you?

…”But they’re just kids. What do they know about stress”?

Funny how quickly we can forget

What it’s like to be a kid

When you don’t fit in, but you don’t stand out

Just another face in the crowd

Just another seat in the class

Just another target of ridicule

Just another kid who isn’t cool, enough

At a time when being cool is everything

There’s a bully in every class

They wonder why you ain’t passing

You bastards making the school look bad

We need a quick fix, give him a quick fix

Just another kid diagnosed with A.D.D., so pay him no attention

You’re probably also bipolar, oh and did we forget to mention?

You’re most likely depressed, but don’t worry…there’s a pill for that

Sure there’s some side effects, but don’t worry… there’s a pill for that

You’ll experience a few headaches, don’t worry there’s a pill for that

You might get the shakes, but don’t worry there’s a pill for that

You’ll develop facial ticks, don’t worry there’s a pill for that

See, we don’t really give a shit…and I don’t think there’s a pill for that

But would you like a refill for that?

Remember kids, drug-free is the way to be

But it’s okay if you’re addicted to the prescription written by your physician

See your physician, he’s just addicted to business

Dedicated to keep you medicated instead of taking the time to just listen

Too bad there’s no pills you can pop to make you popular

But your Pop’s got something you can pop that’s guaranteed to make the bullies stop

Send a click to every clique that thought they were just too fucking cool

Bet your name will ring bells all over the school

A national catastrophe, how could this be?

All-American boy raised on American TV

Brought up with American views

Now his face is all over the American news

How’s that for a taste of fame?

How’s that for the American Dream?

It seems everyone’s looking for someone to blame

Was it movies? Music? Video games?

Parents? Peers? Teachers?

Or was he just a victim of an uncaring system?

It takes a village to raise a child

It takes a nation to destroy him

It takes a tragedy for us to notice

So go ahead and point your finger at the one with the gun pointed

Now all rise for a speech from the one with the bomb pointed

“So, what your point is?”

Nothing, just keep waging your war on drugs, war on bullying, war on violence in the media

And kick your feet up

I’m sure the results will kick in eventually

Generation Y, they ask us why

And we’ll say X marks the spot

But they don’t hear us

By Generation Z…Z…Z…

We’ll be too asleep to even see

Hey, did you watch the news today?

Aren’t you going to ask us what we learned in school today?

No? See, every day the bell rings…and everything’s the same

If we can’t see the problem then it’s never going to change

We watch and cry, then we recover

But never do we anticipate another

The victims and the shooter will never have a future

We can wipe away the blood, but there’s a cut that’s left un-sutured

These are your kids… don’t disown them now

That’s just their school spirit… aren’t you proud?

They never noticed, noticed you

They never noticed, now they do

But not until you brought your gun and your rage and you shot up the school

Now that school spirit haunts them… but aren’t you cool?

Sugar

Please don't call me Spanish, I'm asking nicely
Hispanic...Latina...Dominican...whatever you wanna call me. Just please don't call me Spanish
I am not from Spain
Though I do bear a Spanish surname
Nuñez... the name of some asshole, conqueror, oppressor
I want to hate it
I think to change it
But then I realize that it serves as a reminder
A reminder of where we came from and how we can take something so fucking ugly
And turn it into something beautiful — family
We are fifty shades of colonized
Our skin varies like our stories
We speak the language of our rapists
And pray to the God of our slave masters
...And so do you
Plantation... encomienda, what's the difference?
Sugar canes or cotton fields, but what's the difference?
I don't call you English
So please don't call me Spanish
I am not from Spain
Though I do bear a Spanish surname
Though we do speak the Spanish language
And worship the God of the Roman Catholics
Let us not forget... that we are the eyes and ears of the indigenous
We are the hands and hips of Africa
We are the sugar
White or brown
We are sugar
We take our bitter history and turn it into something sweet
We speak the dialects of the colonized and dance to the rhythms of the oppressed
Azucar
Please don't call me Spanish
Unless you're going to add AND Taina AND African
Please don't whitewash our history any more than it's already been
We are the original inhabitants of this continent
We are the prisoners brought here to build it up into what it is today
And we are the conquistadors who wrote the history books and took all the credit
We are the fruit of genocide
We are the crop of slavery
We are the offspring of rape
But don't be ashamed of who you are, because we can't change the past
Just never forget that we are standing on stolen land
This is a burial ground
The place they say Columbus found
But really, he's the reason we lost it
We lost our languages
We lost our idols
Our culture
Our traditions
But we are sugar
And you can still taste us
They tried to sugarcoat our past
But our past IS sugar-coated hardworking hands
We are sugar
Let us not forget that we are the nose and neck of the indigenous
We are the legs and lips of Africa
We are the sugar
White or brown
We are sugar
We take our bitter history and turn it into something sweet
We are sugar
So please don't call us Spanish

Frank Ocean

So I've been thinking 'bout ya ... you know you did a great thing
You made the choice to do more than just sing
Mr. Ocean, you have become an inspiration
To a community constantly bombarded with slurs and degradation
When too many gay youth live on the streets or in a grave
I just wanna thank you for doing something so brave
You didn't have to, your personal business is your own
But when you're gay, they expect you to make it known
So they can judge you, tell you that you need to be corrected
That you're not normal because you deviate from the expected
Heterosexist version of love
There's a reason they call it homophobia, they are scared of us
Scared of love
Scared of beautiful
Take away our rights just to spite our love
These glorified American weddings were never meant for the like of us
Like the sight of us is a love crime, but all we see is hate crimes
Imagine being afraid to walk home with your love on the late night
Wrong place, time just another statistic that will never see the front page
Too much hate got too many of us dying at a young age
Too much hate got too many of us being brutalized
Too much hate got too many of us committing suicide
Why can't we just live the sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet life?
...Because we're lost
Lost in a society that thinks gay is an insult
The worst thing you could possibly be
Uncomfortable with their sexuality
So they hide behind hypermasculinity
Can't even show love without adding the obligatory
"No homo"
But we didn't even bat an eye
When Nicki Minaj said she was bi
See girl-on-girl is fetishized
And boy-on-boy is demonized
Either way we're dehumanized
But last time I checked, we all had human eyes
A human mouth, a human heart
But we're lost
Lost in a bad religion that tells us we were born the wrong way
Or better yet tells us that we chose to be gay
And I ask you, who would choose this?
Conversion therapy and corrective rape
Who would choose this?
80 countries where you can be arrested for being gay
Who would choose this?
When LGBT homeless youth make up more than half
Who would choose this?
Picket our funerals with signs that read "God hates fags"
Who would choose this?
Would you choose this?
We are lost
Lost, but we all try
There will be tears, but we all cry
We all fight together
It gets better
Fuck tolerance, one day we'll achieve equality and acceptance
And never ever again will we ever feel like we're less than
Love any man that you want.. just make sure to love that man in the mirror
Love any woman that you want, girl.. just make sure to love that woman in the mirror
No one can tell you how to use your emotions
This is your life... this is your ocean
.. So swim good.. and swim good

What It'd Be Like

Have you ever felt like a complete waste of atoms?
Like the future was something you just couldn't fathom
And you didn't even want to
Like you're not dead yet, but you're less than alive
And you gotta admit you're curious to know what it'd be like to die
Cause it seems like no one's there when you need it the most
But everyone will care when you turn into a ghost
I was the 10 the first time I put a razor to my veins
There was barely any blood cause I was startled by the pain
Don't ask me to explain
I can't remember what was going through my brain
I try not to think about it much and I haven't
I didn't know then that this would turn into my habit
I was a child, lost like so many
Uncool and unaware
Misunderstood and unprepared
I couldn't fight the world when I was too upset or too pissed
But somehow I felt in control with a knife to my wrist
I remember when I had my first kiss
It was 30 seconds of bliss
Followed by years of regret
Every day we'd meet 3rd period in the girls bathroom stall
But I couldn't even hold her hand as we walked down the hall
She was open and I was broken hoping no one could see through our "just friends" facade
Cause what would they think of me?
I wanted to be normal so badly
So much so that sadly
I left her for some guy
Lying, trying to convince myself that she was just a phase
Just something I had to try you know, just in case
Just a phase like these cuts that would fade
But these scars on my heart will never go away
I hate who I was then but I'll forgive myself some day
I remember the first time my mother saw my wounds
She was angry, upset, crying, confused
But that was also the first time I realized I had people that cared for me
That were worried and scared for me
And I cried
For all the times I honestly wished I would've died
I remember the first time I put a pencil to the page
The words cut me deeper than the sharpest end of any blade
And as I shed away the skin of the little girl I used to be
Finally I could see
And finally I was free
I remember the first time I learned how to be me
So have you ever felt like a complete waste of atoms?
Like the future was something you just couldn't fathom
And you didn't even want to
Like you're not dead yet, but you're less than alive
And you gotta admit you're curious to know what it'd be like to die
Cause it seems like no one's there when you need it the most
But everyone will care when you turn into a ghost
I know it's hard to tell but there are brighter days to come
Days you'll never get to see if you let yourself succumb
Love yourself, and never ever stop
Just stop trying to be someone that you're not
Depression is a motherfucker, but show him that you're stronger
Even when it feels like you can't take it any longer
And even when it feels like you've got nothing left to give
You gotta admit you're curious to know what it'd be like to live