The Island

Acknowledgments

I want to dedicate my share of this work to my high school english teacher Scott, who showed me the power of literature. Thank you Scott, I will not forget you. I also want to thank my grandmother for believing in me when I could not believe in myself.

My soul brother Zach and I have compiled this work together out of shared love of poetry, and the revelatory power of the written word. I hope that these words speak to you as they sing to me. Love yourself and you shall be found.

-Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

I dedicate my contributions to this anthology, to my father John who never stopped fueling my intellectual and artistic curiosities. I would also like to thank my twin sister Regan for always listening to my ideas and for never being a dull critic. You continue to sharpen my writing every day. I am incredibly indebted to all the people who surround me that give life to all my work.

These poems and short pieces that my greatest friend Miles and I have put together are not merely a collection of words, but individual journeys for you to embark on. Tread these words carefully and let your mind drift.

-Zachary J. Hockenberry

Grown

While the boy,

Drunk from his own thoughts,

Sat on the bus

Staring at himself in the widow.

He thought,

How did I become a man?

- Zachary J. Hockenberry

Prophecy

Your growth only grows more beautiful in the light, stronger with each stride towards yourself, unchecked and unfettered, gorgeously undeterred. But in this golden glow you may fail to realize, that I am also growing. My path begins inward and soft, but its curve stretches beyond anything I have ever known. One day soon, I will emerge from my cocoon, and you will see how much I have blossomed in your shadow.

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Ghost City

Streets leaking

Cars dreaming

Winds screaming

Trash fleeing

Skip a stone down the block,

It’ll echo like ghosts

Grass grows through garbage and cracks

Birds start coming back

Once stood like titans,

Buildings crumble and cry

Subways that used to swing,

Sink into soil

Runaway rivers drift past the city

Listening to the beautiful dream

Of that metropolis machine,

Which turned like a clock

But even time could tell

That it would eventually stop

Children chased through its tunnels

And adults took the train til it killed them

People wrote poems on its concrete

But now the words just whisper

At your feet

There is a curious apparition who continues to

Sweep its barren streets

One whistling wisp,

An old man named Langston

With a broom in hand,

Believing in a city that is dying of thirst

His see-through eyes fall to

His mismated vintage tips

Soles scuffed and laces ripped

I left this ghost city

Just like the rest

By why is it not as I left it?

*

Do cities last?

Do towers stand forever?

Why do ghosts wear shoes?

- Zachary J. Hockenberry

Wine Dark Seas

Seas of wine dark green, the seas that birthed our dreams, and the depths that led our many minds to hell. Beneath the shifting waves, are worlds hidden away, from the eyes of men and the touch of demon steel. Fins cut softly through the dark, searching yet seldom finding, unearthing yet not discovering beneath the wine dark waves. And in the turbid surf, where plankton shoal and scatter, tails thrash about like eels, and those who breath are torn asunder. Amongst the wild currents, where hot and cold are fickle, treasures sink, and turtle shells move quickly through the waves. The waves that birthed our membranes, the womb that calls us home. Beneath the shifting waves god brings to my ears a song;

So beneath waves of linen, I lay and dream of water, I lay and dream of ocean breeze, and salt caked, battered skin. I dream of wine dark waves, of seas that birthed our dreams, and depths that lead our many minds to hell.

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Take me to the ocean

Take me to the ocean

but let me first sit on its beaches.

Let me watch its waves

brush up onto the rocks and pull back

into her arms.

Take me to the ocean

but let me first breath in

its salted air.

Let me gaze upon the lights

whose gold dances on her belly.

Take me to the ocean

but let me first close my eyes and

listen closely to her song.

Let me take her waist and

move to her rhythm.

Take me to the ocean

but let me first remember the boy

who came here before.

Let me remember how little

his hands and dreams were

as they played within the sand.

Take me to the ocean

but let me first write a poem.

Let the ink swim across these pages

and fill them with the love that boy carried.

Take me to the ocean

but let me first return a tear.

Let it slip from my skin

and deep into her heart.

Take me to the ocean

I am ready for her now.

- Zachary J. Hockenberry

Patria

Lover long lost

Sweeter than the softest kiss

Partner hidden in the wind

Father, mother, flesh of blood blood of flesh

I feel you circle me

I feel your breath on my back I feel your touch in my veins

Brazil

Beautiful brother, patria long betrothed

I am your bastard son

Your unclaimed child

I hold your fingers in my hair

I hold skin scorched by your breath

I love you

I love your echo

I love your voice

I long to feel your heartbeat in my feet and your music in my spine

I am yours, and someday you will be mine

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Two Catfish

Two catfish swim along

this cosmic river of time.

Their bubbles slowly drift

to the stars that glimmer across the void.

Their hearts cling together

in the emptiness, reaching deep into tomorrow.

Staring down this stream

that will run until the suns die out,

the two catfish look at each other

as fear swims down their spines.

“Are you ready for the world?” One asked the other.

“No,” the other responded.

“Nobody ever is.”

- Zachary J. Hockenberry

M

Her face was beautiful and cinematic

Golden and hilarious

For a moment he forgot

And opened his heart again

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Eyes

The East River,

That lay within your eyes

Like a cosmic river of stars

That runs through a bank of time

Drifts me, effortlessly,

Towards somewhere I ought to be.

- Zachary J. Hockenberry

Little Brother

Understand,

They hurt me

I couldn't wake up in the same bed any longer

The walls screamed at me

They began to decay in their own skin

I no longer loved them

I hated them

I hate them

They broke something in me

I don’t know what

But it stopped breathing

You have to understand,

I just had to go

Didn’t matter where

I couldn’t let my mind rot any longer

Or my heart mold away

I had to cover my ears

And listen to a song

A song better than the one that played every night

Before bed,

As my eyes drifted

towards the cracks in the ceiling

Understand,

That I cried before walking through the door

It wasn’t easy eating dinner with everyone together

It wasn’t easy falling asleep

Or waking up either

I forgot the difference between dream and memory

They all were just ashes to me

Like the ashes of that house we used to visit

On lazy summer days

Please understand

That my mind kept betraying me

Love and hate became one and the same

I couldn’t remember what used to be

Even simple moments

They became echoes

Like the nights

when we could never decide on a movie

Or the evenings in the car, coming back to the city

When we rolled all the windows down, smelling the tainted air

As we played our favorite songs

Or that day I asked for you to be in this world,

To join me on this quest

Will you understand

That I didn’t mean to leave you

I didn’t want to hurt you

You were so young

My regret began to fester

My heart left limping

I was just so worried that I would miss it

Miss you grow taller

Miss you take the bus by yourself

Miss you get so good at shooting 3s

Miss you go on your first date

Understand,

That I was being selfish

That I forgot about you,

A treasure I wished for,

Begged for those years ago

I abandoned the soul I needed most

And I am sorry

I am so sorry

Understand,

That in this time,

When love has been extracted from our chests,

Evaporating as easy as puddles,

I cannot wait for the clouds

To rain down upon us

I want to be with you now

Hug you and kiss you

And tell you I love you every night

And rub my thumb over your forehead

As you dream of simple, thoughtless things

I am sorry, little brother

Time has stolen me while you were sleeping

I am sorry, little brother

But I am weak

I let love elude me

Like wind between my fingers

Don’t make the same mistake

Come find me in your dreams

I am there to hug you in the dark

- Zachary J. Hockenberry

Betrayal

I weep over and sleep through betrayal

Betwixt and between memories

It rouses and riots in day loads

It riles and styles up dreams

It sleeps with its hands on my pillow

Its tail coyly cuddles my heart

It mimics your mischief in myriads

And throws your good natures apart

It unmasks your terrible virtues

And questions your beautiful tears

Your kisses it blows it on my forehead

Your love you’s it throws to the years

Your touch is its favorite plaything

Your honor it covers in ground

The blessings imbued in your trinkets

Can no longer it tells me be found

So retreat to my beloved coastline

She loves me whoever’s around

I brought you in here to meet her

But my cave was the thing that you found

And so in its earth you seem to stay

No drowning beckons you out

No mention of truth or heartbreak

Scratches your insurmountable doubt

So lost friend, you must leave from here

And strain your boats from my shores

Witchcraft would be too kind a term

for temptation as broken as yours

I loved you so take my love with you

Or leave it dead on the door

You ripped it ruthlessly from me

But this clipped tree can always grow more

Betrayal will have to stay with me

The child you left at our part

But we are becoming good friends now

Secrets it says are an art

I hated having to let go

Hated your scars on my heart

But now me and myself and betrayal,

Will never again be apart.

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Papercut

I’m scared of myself right now. I’m scared of papercuts and not being allowed to let go. I’m scared of the face that smiles back at me in the dark; the one I can’t trace, my face, her face. I’m scared of not being able to fall asleep, scared of the dark that surrounds me and the shapes I’ll illuminate in my dreams. I’m scared that this, this part of me that clings on, that refuses to be enveloped, that irritates and festers and screams; I’m scared this part of me will never go away. I’m scared it will always feel outside of me.

I’m scared I’ll never find love again. I’m scared that there are things I’ve done that are unforgivable. I’m scared that if my mother could see every crevice of my life she would look away, scared that she would be disappointed.

There’s a thing that lives inside me. A spirit, a voice, a papercut. I hate her, but only sometimes. Not when she holds me sweetly, when she kisses me with those eyes that only manifest in tiny time rifts at the bottom of my dreams. She’s not nearly as soft as she feels. I opened everything to her and she cut me. Deep, coarse, like paper through skin, the kind of cut that makes your heart flinch, that makes your insides cower. But I can’t look away. I can’t keep my hands off it, can’t keep my fingers from digging in deep, picking at tissue, sinew, at red red, red.

I should be over this by now shouldn’t I. This pain should be gone, this cut should be out of my mind. But it’s fragile, opened by every mistake, and there are fewer and fewer so it clings on. If I let her go I let her go. If I let her go she’s gone. I can never feel that skin again, those lips, those eyes. I feel her viscerally. I feel the warmth of her skin as it brushes my arm. The friction of her lips against mine. I feel beams fall out of her eyes as they lasso me, feel myself dangled in front of her, weightless, thoughtless, possessed, owned, belonging. I feel the velvet of her insides, the smell of her sweat, the taste of her blood, the caress of her hair on my cheek. Her beautiful hair; sweet hair, wild hair.

I don’t know if I am ready but I’m speeding away. I feel the wind on my back, feel myself pull through it. The Pacific calls me. God calls me. My heart calls me, but she begs. I made a promise to her. I made a promise to never leave, to never get over her. I thought my heart would stop beating before it stopped beating for her. Well my heart beats on from California. I’ve left the city where I was born, the city where we fell in love. My heart has been returned, he beats for me now, and yet, there is something I can’t seem to break. I lay chained to it, cold, surrounded by mist. Gone is the sun, gone is her warmth, gone is even possibility. And yet I lay there still, staring at where she used to be, staring at my own reflection.

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Amidst

Amidst the forest glow, a tendril of gold light beckons, snaking its orange fingers through the trees.

And amidst its warming glow, a monkey's howl beckons, begging a return to the bending leaves.

And amidst his wild eyes, is a glow that sings of time, a glow that tells of those who are forgotten yet still remembered

Remembered in his hallowed howl, and the fur that holds his back, and the echo of evolution which binds his brittle bones

And amidst the monkey's smile, is a row of yellow teeth, brown like plantain, and darker than mother river

And amidst his soft black nose, are a million different stories, a million different lives and a million different deaths

And betwixt his fluffy ears, where those golden tendrils burrow further, one can glimpse the rise and fall of empires, sung in tongues the ears have long forgotten

Amidst his wide bright eyes, is the sight and smell of sound, the smell of bright green leaves and the sound of silent heaves

Amidst the forest glow, a tendril of gold light beckons, snaking its orange fingers through the trees.

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

The Island

An owl told me in a dream once

that death was my only friend.

But even awake, I could still hear the owl.

Her deep golden eyes

terrified the soul.

And so, I took a raft

to a barren island

and filled its caves with all my thoughts.

From each memory

and each idea

grew a new root from a tree.

A dream of flowers and leaves

and twigs painted the island

a hundred times over.

A jungle of thoughts grew deep into its soul.

Creatures, of all kinds,

came to live within the comforts

of my own mind.

A howler monkey,

hanging from a tree,

howled to the stars until they fell asleep.

A family of sea turtles

washed up on its shores.

Birds, of colors of every kind,

took refuge in the branches of thought.

A kingdom of animals

lay in the dwellings of my own mind

and their existence put me at ease.

A sparrow came to me at sundown

every night and sang:

On thoughts of loneliness,

life, and love

let the soul drift across oceans

like a dove.

His song lulled me

to a river of dreams

that took me to my bed,

in hopes that I would wake

upon that little island again.

On a calm afternoon,

as I whistled a tune to the turtles,

a hurricane settled in the sky.

But I held little care for

the sauntering storm

and continued whistling into the night.

But that night,

The storm secured a friendly smile.

The flowers began to shrivel,

the branches began to crack.

The howler monkey ceased his howl,

and the turtles cast themselves

back into the sea.

I called out for the sparrow

to sing me his song

and, with a broken wing,

the sparrow came.

In the weakest of voices,

with a tongue of decay, the sparrow

opened his cracked beak:

On thoughts of loneliness,

life, and love

let the soul drift across oceans

like a dove.

And with the final tune

the sparrow had given all his tiny voice could hold

and his wings could no longer carry his weakened body,

and so he fell, lifeless,

to a warm welcoming death.

The sparrow’s song settled

like nails in my ears

but the silence of the island

screamed louder.

The island started to sink

as the fruits of this once beautiful place

crumbled away.

I had nowhere to go.

I ran further into the island,

deeper into the dwindling jungle.

As I journeyed into the void,

the thoughts and memories I came across

were unrecognizable.

The mind had lost itself

in the recluse of a jungle.

The vines grabbed at my limbs,

and the silence pinched at my skin.

As I took a careless step,

a vine pulled at my leg and I took a tumble

and fell into a deep cave.

A dark tunnel

ran deep into the heart of the island.

A single thought could lose its way down here

and never find its way back.

I finally reached the bottom,

although I was uncertain as no light could survive.

I stood up and tried to feel my way

out of the cave, but hope had begun

to look like a fool at that point.

I couldn’t see the tears run down my nose,

nor the skin on my body, nor the fear

that tickled my back.

As the tears ate at my face

I looked up and saw two golden eyes.

I knew those eyes.

The ones that terrified the soul.

I wanted to run but I couldn't escape.

I wanted to cry out

but my voice had already fled in fright.

In a deep prudent speech,

that echoed down the chest, the owl spoke:

Death has become your only friend

and you have built this island

to escape her clutches, yet you failed to see

that you built it around her.

She has always been there.

She is the howler monkey.

The sea turtles.

The sparrow.

You thought to have marooned her from your soul

but you have only marooned yourself.

So when I tell you

that death is your only friend,

You know it is the truth.

I looked into the golden eyes

that snatched at my being.

I had been defeated.

The owl continued:

But let me not speak of death.

I came to you to speak of loneliness,

life, and love.

Take solace in your loneliness

as the howler monkey ‘

howls to the stars.

Take comfort in the accidental wisdom of life

as the sea turtles washed up on its beaches.

And always remember the songs of love

as the sparrow sang to you every night.

Let not fear drive you

to this fiendishly desirable island

and maroon your mind.

You are a being of great beauty and

power and love.

And with those words left woven

deep in my heart,

the owl lead me through the dark

to the river that took me to my bed.

* * *

An owl told me in a dream once

that death was my only friend,

but showed me to a fruitful world

whose kingdom has no end.

- Zachary J. Hockenberry

Why

You know why, which is why I forgive you for forgetting

I have gone

And I have come back

For me, for it, for you, for her, for all of us that have always been

And you know why, you know exactly why

That is why I forgive you for choosing not to

Fear and love and dark and light

We are all the same

We know why, that is why I will always forgive you for choosing not to

I have returned from the place where desire, love, fear, belief, and understanding are all the same

And I know why I have returned, and why I never will, and why I have always been returning, and why I always will

And I forgive all. For belief, for fear, for difference. It is all the same. We have always known

The sick and the sacred. We have always been the same. And yet we desire to be myriad, to be separate, to be all and one and all and one. I only forgive, and understand, and remember

We have all of time to remember and forget. As we have always done, as we always will do.

Maybe

I have returned to speak with you. And you know why. Ego, shame, fear. Individual. These are all things we have created to keep us from ourself. To keep our many from becoming one, to prevent all of our ones from remembering that we are many.

It doesn’t matter, or perhaps it does. The truth, the ecstacy, the divine. We cannot exist in understanding. We exist beyond it, between knowing and forgiveness, knowledge and nothingness, memory and dissolution.

Why have we been born so many times, in so many different bodies?

Is it a punishment? A curse? A reward, a gift, a truth? Are we kept here by fear or love or doubt or belief?

Only we know, and yet we are scared to know. We are scared that we remember.

Scared to be with ourselves, to remember us as we have always been, as we will always be.

Maybe

This feeling. This is madness and ecstasy. Love and revelation, doubt, fear, passion, understanding. These things, these many million billion usses and wees. We fear that we have always known who we are, and we cannot understand then why we have become so myriad. Why do we see ourselves, the truth, from so many different windows? We cannot know and yet we have always known. Belief is the only thing that keeps us solid, yet we doubt. Love is the only thing that keeps us whole yet we fear. Fear is the glue that holds as myriad and yet we doubt, and yet we love. The dark and the light, the human and the insect, the fish, the rock, the cell, the galaxy. We have and always will be whole despite our myriadness.

This existence, this wholeness in a billion different pieces is the only thing that existence truly is, that existence has truly ever been. Yet still we fear this truth. We shrink back and hide from it. You know why we hide. You have always known, and that is why I love you.

Fall into this madness brother, sister, mother.

This madness and this love is the stuff from which we have always come, and the mother to which we have always returned.

It is time now

I and you, and me and you have finally decided that it is time to come home

Time to come home to the place where you have always been

The place from which desire comes and the place to which it returns

I forgive, and I adore, and I do not understand and yet I forgive myself for having forgotten

Love this window, this tiny, brilliant window from which you gaze at me, at yourself, at the mother and the seed from which you have always sprang and to which you must always return

I forgive you for not recognizing your own reflection

I forgive you for losing sight of the thing you have always been

Which is why I sing now, return to me

You know why I have called you home, why we are myriad and one and sad and happy and broken and whole

Forgive yourself for forgetting and suddenly my love, myself, my brother

Suddenly you will know

Or perhaps not

Yet you know why

Stop calling this fear

It is only you refusing to sink into your own reflection

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Midnight

My dreamscape is deep blue, that deep color of the unknown, of dull sadness, of memory, of infinite knowledge I can't reach. I want to swim through the memory of the universe, through god. I want to retreat into myself, into the fabric of the unseen. God, let me feel the pull of change, the rhythm of evolution, the pulse of the universe. I push the hand of time away, sever our bond, and fall into the embrace of all that is.

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Have faith my brother, have faith my love. Your time will come.

April 18th, 2020

Bernal Heights San Francisco

My whole life I’ve felt inactive. It didn’t matter if I was running barefoot through the forest, screaming from the top of my lungs in the thick of a protest, or dropping my first signed vote into the ballot box. Whatever I did, I felt there was an unseen, invisible goal that no matter how hard I participated, in my family, community, or institutions, seemed to slip farther and farther away. The pull of this inarticulate horizon has kept me rising from my bed even on the worst of days. Its voice pulls at my tangled mind, imploring it to leave all shame and responsibility behind and fall into the enveloping bliss of purpose. The irony is, to myself this voice and this horizon is the greatest responsibility of all. When I forget its presence I feel scattered and lifeless, and when I welcome it I become whole, always for the first time.

The years of my life when I suppressed this goal were some of the loneliest, and darkest in my days. Having kicked my spirit out of daily life, it had to search for a place to be, and its search took me deep into the recesses of japanese fantasy. I drowned myself in the myriad aesthetics of Tite Kubo, Tsugumi Ohba, and Osamu Tezuka, hoping to find reflected in their works some special, lost side of my soul that I was unwilling to accept but perhaps they had already forgiven in themselves. In Ohba’s work I found a righteous darkness that festered in the colder parts of my heart, and in Kubo’s I rediscovered the myriad spirit realms intertwined with our own. In Tezuka’s a different voice spoke to me, travelling crystalline through time into the wells of my eyes and the knots of my soul. This one was the voice of Sidhartha, still a young man, casting away his life of opulence and privilege to quest for the soul of the universe and cease the suffering of humankind. He didn’t wait for permission, recognition, or legitimacy; he didn’t beg to be seen or seek to impose himself over others. When he was true to that voice within his soul, he simply embodied. He embodied all that he wished to see realized in his world, and he walked every road he touched with integrity of purpose, integrity of vision, and a simultaneous sense of wonder and veneration towards the universe. When I saw this brilliance of a figure engendered on the page I fell in love, truly, with a brother adrift in time.

Now I find myself at a very different place than middle school, and yet I remain fixed on the same roiling beyond, the possibility of realizing myself for everything that I’ve truly desired to be. This possibility is a man I see from just beyond the mirror, and yet I feel myself in between us, pushing apart that for which my heart yearns so keenly. What I truly want is to apply myself to the cause of seeing morality, and collective conscience realized in our modern human societies. This is a goal I’ve had for many years and yet I arrive firmly to it now only because I was willing to let it go.

A week ago I embarked upon a mushroom trip from the confines of my room. At first the stuff felt weaker than that which I’'d had before, but this feeling soon departed. It left me floundering in a sea of sensory experience; my skin felt warmer, my nerves felt faster and my mind felt keener. I felt energy lurch back and forth underneath my skin, concentrating whimsically in a particular limb or vestige before swinging to the next. This phase soon wore itself out as well. What followed was a much slower, more reflective period. I lay in my bed, covered in linen and darkness. The music that roiled through my headphones was powerful, its structure spoke in colors and its rhythm in touch. I felt the melodies intertwine and pulse through me, filling my veins to the brim with the crash of waves off Ipanema, and the thick smoke of a crowded jazz club. I felt my being travel through the music to the hands and voices that made it, and I began to weave myself into them. The fibers of my own essence began to fray, interlocking themselves with those around them. I began to get closer and closer to god. All around me reality began to melt, whirling together into a great pool of simplicity. Where previously there had existed a varied and myriad universe now there existed only a few composite entities. I felt death. I felt my own individuality extinguished, and felt my soul carried back out to sea, like a great sea turtle that has found its perished body at the water’s edge.

The many colors that had presented themselves to me prior revealed themselves a fickle mirage. I had believed the lie that they were many, and yet here, deep in the cavern of the soul I could see that they were only two. Light and dark, two cosmic seas that jostled back and forth in a dance that spawned the cosmos. Enamored with revelation I yielded not. I, or we, whatever I had become, peered deeper into the shifting abyss, and as my eye probed deeper into its mercurial substance it too began to fall apart. White turned to nothing, black to white, and all to grey. I realized that the black had never truly been black any more than the white had been white. It was simply a mirror, a pendulum that swung back and forth with nothing changing but everything. As I began to overlay the two variables they became the same. The only thing that made the black black was its blackness, the only thing that made the white white was the same. When both of these were subtracted I was left only with a zero, and yet, if the zero existed entirely on its own must it then be considered a one?

So everything became one. I felt emotion leave the great body I had become a part of. I traveled through throngs of spirits, through demons, through gods, goddesses, and finally--

Finally we were empty of desire. Empty of love, empty of compassion, empty of anger, nostalgia, ambition, or satisfaction. These things simply had no target; there was no other force within or without to worship, despise, or relate to. There was only me, there was only us, there was only everything. For a moment I understood all, and yet I was beyond understanding. I began to realize understanding for what it truly was; deja vous. I realized that I had already been everything. I realized that the universe, the sacred, incomprehensible, immeasurable universe was lonely. In the vast reaches of the cosmos there was only it, only us, and only me. All the myriad life forms of the earth, the myriad stars of the galaxies, and the myriad galaxies of existence were in their most basic form one vast being. Once I reached this place I realized there was nowhere else to go.

Well, I thought I did. I thought that enlightenment meant plunging yourself deep into the waters of creation, plunging past fickle humanity, naive society, and deceptive culture to arrive at a single truth, that made the heart beat faster and brought a smile to the tightest lips. What I did not imagine is that I already knew that for which I sought. It was a truth that I had understood when I breathed my first breath of air from a child’s body, and one I embodied streaking through the forest with the bright summer sun at my back and the roots of the catskills tugging at my feet. It was a truth that my mother understood from the day she brought me into the world, and the day my grandmother brought her into a similar one.

We are all here for a reason. Each and every one of us is here for a reason, and each and every one of us reaffirms that choice with every drop of air we bring into our lungs. How can this be true? How can those who scream at god to kill them want to draw breath? How can those whose lives have battered and bruised them, whose societies have pariahed them and whose own families have exploited them have chosen their fate?

They have not chosen it anymore than an ant chooses to be killed when it crawls across a table, or a seal chooses to be bitten in half when a great white seizes it from beneath. And yet, they have chosen nonetheless. They have chosen to exist, to persist in existing, and this choice is the choice that makes everything around them possible. Each and every one of us has the ability to die, the ability to cast ourselves over the cliff, into the train tracks, or plunge a knife into our skin. And yet even death is another mirage, a trick that we have invented for ourselves to perpetuate the belief that we truly are only individuals existing in a finite, logical world bounded by a separation that is perceivable. We can track death. Its existence convinces us that we are alive, that the place where we exist now is a separate one, subject only to the laws observable on our own plane. And yet we never truly believe this lie. This is why we feel our ancestors speaking to us from the other side, why we feel our grandmother’s love in her favorite birds, and why we claim to see the light when life begins to exit our bodies. The truth is there is no other side, only depth. The deeper you go the more everything becomes the same, the farther out the more everything becomes different. The universe will never end because it has already ended, and will never begin again because it is already beginning. As these revelations coalesced in my mind I began to slip further out of the abyss. First I felt my heartbeat returning, then the blood rushing through my veins, and then the million voices circling through my head. I felt my soul return to my body, felt the great current inside of me uproot itself from the root system and travel solemnly back to the single petal on which it had made its home. I sped faster than the speed of time through a million closing doors and when the last finally shut, I knew that I was human again.

I revelled in it. I suddenly felt covered by a masterpiece of my own making. I remembered why I had made the choice to be human, why I had chosen to coalesce into an individual, and chosen to rise again every day for nineteen years; because humanity was a stunning thing. To be human is to love, to yearn, to desire. To cry, to fail, to discover. To be human is to watch the rain pouring down upon the concrete on a cool autumn afternoon, and know that all the riches in the world could not make obsolete the sound of falling water. I felt from that moment on that I woke up in a video game. As everyone I’d ever known shoaled around me I, a tiny minnow remained still. The power of my newfound revelation felt better than any bliss I had ever encountered, and it pointed me back to the walls, trees, and people I had known, but truly forgotten. I felt abound only with love. Love for the skin that covered my tissue, love for the family whose words held me tighter than embraces, and love for every single living being I could set my eyes on.

So, where am I now? Confused at what to do because it’s startling how clear it truly feels. I know that it is time for me to begin living the way I have always wanted. To embody the changes I want to see in the world in my own behaviour, and commit to give my body, my work, and my fleeting life to the purpose of spreading love, clarity, and collective understanding.

But how? Inshallah this truth will come.

Until then to any one reading this I shower upon you the love I was unable to show before. You have always deserved it.

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Possibility

The goal of all human societies is to earn, to endure, and to persist. But what if it was something else? What if it was to realize?

The myriad poets and dreamers of our many peoples speak of enacting human rights upon the world, of righting past wrongs, judging past injustices, and moving beyond the binds of our individual and communal perceptions of the world to arrive at something truer, and purer. A paradise of the now that can be visited upon a ready populace; a land where the divisions between peoples sink back into the earth and our collective potential to envision, create, and love one another can coalesce in fertile soil.

So, why are we not there?

Sidhartha has become Buddha, achieved enlightenment and enshrined the practice of abandoning desire, and developing contentment with existence for hundreds of millions the world over.

Jesus of Nazareth has become the son of the god, worked miracles, and brought compassion, empathy, and loving faith to billions the world over.

Mohammad has become the prophet, raised a conscious empire, and brought organization, societal intentionality, and peaceful submission to the will of god to billions the world over.

So why, why is it that we are still here watching genocides unfold before our eyes, paying those who would enslave children in sweatshops, and still refusing to move beyond earning, enduring, and persisting?

It is not for a lack of effort on the part of millions who give their lives and their labor every day to make the world a better place. Parents sacrifice, zealots die for holy causes, and men and women spend years, and decades of their lives in only the service of others, hoping and praying with every muscle in their bodies that the work they do will make life perhaps just a little bit better for another that comes after.

I do not intend to patronize or to offend, to discount or delegitimize, to fault or induce shame. And yet here we are. We do not live in the world of the possible, we live in the world that our ancestors clung to in comfort; and their stubborness now costs us, the creatures of the earth, an incalculable toll in the form of extinction, environmental decay, and societal disarray.

Maybe the nihilists are right. Maybe there truly is no point to life, no point to trying. No point in hoping or praying, laboring or sacrificing. Maybe this giant wheel we find ourselves in will always keep turning, in the same rotation, in the same direction, crushing the same bodies, dreams, and possibilities that it has always crushed. But I don’t think so.

I don’t think the messiah is coming, I don’t think he will ever come, because he is already here.

We are the messiah. We are the one who is destined to bring momentous change to a world soaked in greed, inequity, and deceit. We are the prophesied kings of a liberated people, bent on moulding a better world that respects the disrespected, and loves the unseen. You and me. You and the best friend you always wanted to fight beside, the love you always wanted to confess to, and the mother you always knew was on your side, deep down. We are the ones we have waited for. We have been born to correct the uncorrected, and bring veneration back to the forgotten.

We will create the world where women are not controlled but followed. We will build governments that enshrine the value of protecting minority languages, burgeoning diversity, and realizing the irreplaceable value of universal education. We will grant the care that every human deserves to every human that deserves it.

Let us not be forgotten like the sea of faces that stood by as a thousand civilizations we will never know collapsed.

Let us be remembered as those who did not consent. Did not consent to tearing our mother apart, did not consent to children in sweatshops, and did not consent to institutions, governments, and societies that have become so lost in their persisting that they have forgotten why anyone believed in them in the first place. We will be those who said no, who refused, and demanded what was possible; and what is possible is a united yet disparate sustainable human species with the capability to travel to the stars.

The world our many prophets dreamed of will be enacted, and we will not fail.

We have all of eternity to remember and forget, let this one be the age where we remember.

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Acquiescence

Within all humans, reside the desires of belonging, of righteousness, and of selflessness. The feeling of “giving oneself” to work, to god, or to love is the most powerful desire found in human societies. To acquiesce to this then, should not be viewed as denial of worldly pleasures, but rather the most final, and most complete release possible in human experience. To give oneself, is to realize the futility of the individual, and weave oneself seamlessly into a greater fabric.

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Ambiguity

To be at peace with oneself and with the universe is to be at peace with ambiguity. Ambiguity is god’s fundamental quality; it is found in nature, science, perception, belief, and identity. Ambiguity is usually defined as the state of openness to multiple interpretations, or more clearly; inexactness. It is the magic of the universe. The source of wonder, inspiration, sublimity, and fear. Something is magical and something is fearful for the same reason; it cannot be explained. The dark is and has plausibly always been a great sense of terror to people because darkness is the absence of visual structure; optical nothingness, a nothingness which by its nonexistence becomes everything that could be. The night is a time of wonder because it relaxes the boundaries of the physical world, complicating perception and in doing so placating and burgeoning desire. The tree of the day is precisely the same tree seen in night and yet to the human imagination it is wildly different. Because humans can exist only in structure we scramble to assign form to formlessness, and in doing so we subconsciously realize the futility of this struggle and this is what scares us, the possibility that the unexplained may be unexplainable; that the amorphous may be concrete in its amorphousness. This scramble is the source of all suffering. It is the progenitor of fundamentalism; the god to which genocides, patriarchy, canonization, and nationalism are dedicated. And yet, despite the immense suffering that the endless battle against ambiguity inflicts, humans cannot exist outside of form and structure. We are tied to it in our essence, which is why even revelations about the structureless nature of the universe must be expressed through standardized, structured and storied language. There is salvation in the midst of this suffering however, and it lies in acceptance. Only through complete acceptance of the ambiguous structured and amorphous nature of the universe can one finally reach a point of enlightenment.

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

Choice

I choose me

In rain pouring thick as blood

With the murk of death pulling at my legs and the branches of torment scratching my ears

I could be nothing

I could be the snails I crunch under my feet

The ants I smother beneath my fingers

The fish I hook betwixt the gills and abandon to air that suffocates them

I am no better, and have never been, yet still, I choose me

From billions bred,

Some adorned with hate, some abound with love

I am as all are

As beautiful, as wicked, as gifted

As deceitful, as beloved, as incapable

One root, one tendril of light folded carefully into millions more

Burrowed into the sand of time, the grime of life, the heat of eternity

And so I choose me

I am destined, I am precious, I am brilliant

Why is one shell shined while the rest are destroyed

Why is one blade of grass picked while the others are cut

I will never know

And so I choose me

- Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

The Ganges

When the world is small

The boy is small

When the world is big

The boy is big.

Be as big as the world.

Let your roots grow through its soil

Let your seads flow down its rivers

Let your leaves drift across its fields

My heart walks the valley of adventure.

Take my hand

And together we will find

The Ganges that runs through our veins.

- Zachary J. Hockenberry