POETRY SENTENCE STARTERS: EXCERPTS FROM THE MARIPOSA LETTERS by JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA (from Singing at the Gates: Collected Poems) PACK 1 feel free to modify as you wish!
In blind heat I flung myself into this joyous undertaking.
But instead I live.
My teachers were as strange as footprints on the ceiling.
I blew away the margins and perimeters of all that I had known
You got one minute to get out.
You have sixty seconds to grab everything that means something to you.
Everything burned before me and I stood and watched it burn down.
I went through my memories and started scaling and trimming and editing to revive them from the ashes.
I must leave everything behind.
Any artifact that affirms your humanity is invaluable.
I mean, imagine, living in a place where men are stripped down to their essential cores.
And yet despite my poverty, shivering bones, and lack of food and basic essentials for everyday living, I was happier than I had ever been.
It was a time of reckoning and regeneration.
This man’s got more balls than a herd of bulls.
All of us experience conflict with joy and pain.
I handle the glittering diamond-hilt of hate daily and decide what to do.
Memories tangle up in trees like gigantic cobwebs.
I realize prison is but another name for a long long night in which the one you most love is absent.
I have begun to speak a new language.
With you, I touch on words I never knew existed.
I can’t vocalize them, but within me a whole land of people have finally found their mother tongue.
Now I feel I belong, finally with meaning.
I feel like a child with you.
We are children.
They say our dreams are not real.
We look at each other and smile.
We have felt hurt a million times like buckshot in our wings.
If that dream is broken, each man breaks inside himself.
I will tell what I want.
I want your hips to shake like a fish flapping out of water.
Explode for me.
Devour and plunder me.
How far will a man go and what is he to do in the face of truth that doesn’t even look like truth, but feels hidden inside somewhere?
I’ve hidden deep within me that kind of truth, the kind that snarls when you come too close to it.
My voice you hear cannot be drowned out.
Maybe I won’t have fools living next to me.
I’m sitting here basking in the slamming noise of gates.
And I’m sitting here thinking all this.
Ten feet away and they act like there ain’t nobody here.
I carry on rejoicing in my humanity, singing.
So many faces in me lie dead.
So many untruths crawl without arms or legs.
I sit here now and watch the many faces of men scuttle up from their black dark dens.
I see so many come from hiding places.
I have finished my spiritual battle and am strong enough, have survived my own weaknesses.
Everything is calm.
Now my first step is a step of a breathing man.
He has the grace of a wild beast.
I am richly blessed with so many things to find out, to touch and hear.
Men in rags and broken souls crawl up with dusty shoes from gutters and carry blades in their pockets.
But they are flowers that have survived their thorns.
I am strong enough to hear them.
Songs are magic that keeps men alive when nothing else will.
I step forward, onward.
I found they were worthless in this land that loved money and chained children with lies.
I have silenced my poetry and tongue.
Your letters are like those rocky streams one meets on a long journey.
I will tickle you.
The lock of hair you have given me I will wear around my neck.
I am a little boy gone mad.
Call me to sing and dance.
I would have known me in my disguise.
Each moment was a holy one.
If only I could open my palm and show the world the diamonds of my heart.
I will be leaving this place.
Some have lost an eye of half a finger.
Screams of the long dead still night still hang there like webs in the corner of the ceiling.
Life times are spun from silk that burns easily in the moonlight.
So many condemn themselves for the sin of being born.
Whoever I might have been must know who I am.
I would like to rest, by a stream, take off my bandana and wet it.
Inside the letter was a lock of your hair.
Now I understand how an enchanted young man is led off into the woods.
They curl next to me while I listen long into the night.
Only one thing matters.
I wait, there is nothing to do but wait.
I’m carried toward that day.
I wait for the day when I will leave.
That day is a seed, yet to bloom.
But tell me, someone.
How does one meet it?
I search for secrets in my life.
Everything seems to crawl out of hiding in the death of who I was.
I talk with warriors here who live by the knife and as they speak of death and danger I think how much I love you.
I share my cigarettes and coffee with him.
I close my eyes and your face appears.
No matter where I walk, nothing changes.
Mondays in the joint take on a different tone than other days.
I’m feeling like a million because we are together.
I keep flying.
I am in prison but do not give me sympathy.
I sit here watching the dusk and dreaming of love.
It’s Saturday morning here.
Sleep because there is nothing else to do.
I have picked the seeds out of my rotting life.
The greatest wisdom is found in darkness.