“To accept one’s past - one’s history - is not the same as drowning in it, it is learning how to use it.” -unknown quote, just sum sh*t I read

You can take the person out the ghetto but you can’t take the ghetto out the person. I’ve been to a typical New England Boarding School - Andover - and an Ivy League institution - Columbia University - and I still feel like if I go crazy tomorrow, you will find me on a corner or near a park’s benches - zoned out mumbling or shouting one of my poems. Not that my sh*t is classic material that you can mouth off & people will finish your sentences, but to me it gets no realer because I know everything that I write about.

We need to put some type of order to the chaos of everyday living & I do that by bridging the gaping gaps left by my lower miseducation. I need to see life happening while routine is in place. Mostly everyone’s past is fractured in some hairline or compound way. The real question is how do we place the jagged edges back together? Overlap is sometimes okay but we don’t want no black holes we can’t return from either.

Before we can accept our oppressors, we must see ourselves purely and examine the ways we’ve been tainted. Me - by this point all the good/bad parts are together blurred into non descript emotion that causes me sometimes to feel frozen & I be shivering in the sun. I wonder how I even have the language to tell you this pain. That saying it would have been better to be blind than to see the ugly realness of reality - I do be feeling that way because so many folks I see not even questioning their positions with smiles on their faces while I wallow in empty satisfaction sulking in silence with a chorus of apathetic apologies in hushed harsh tones.

We use history like Dutches unwrap split discard the extra & roll it just right so that we can pull for a while. The Puerto Rican Day Parade is beautiful some don’t even know what the place is or looks like. All we know are coquis coquitos chupacabras chuletas bloody battered bochinche pernil PR Air Force 1s & you can find us screaming Que Bonita Bandera & WEPA til we lose our voices.

The future? That’s a heavy question but let’s hope the answer is a beautiful canela baby eyes like midnite at la playa climbing out of its colonial crib with bars crawling towards the sunset over the projects reaching for the moon while smiling.

-Morales, 2004