Friday, June 13, 2014

Poem of the Week: Regie Cabico

Regie Cabico  
A Queerification

for Creativity and Crisis at the National Mall

queer me     
shift me     
transgress me   
tell my students i'm gay    
tell chick fil a i'm queer  
tell the new york times i'm straight    
tell the mail man i'm a lesbian   
tell american airlines  
i don't know what my gender is   
like me 
liking you 
like summer blockbuster armrest dates
armrest cinematic love 
elbow to forearm in the dark    
humor me queerly    
fill me with laughter   
make me high with queer gas      
decompress me from centuries of spanish inquisition
& self-righteous judgment 
like the blood my blood   
that has mixed w/  the colonizer
 & the colonized    
in the extinct & instinct to love  
bust memories of water & heat 
& hot & breath 
beating skin on skin fluttering    
bruise me into vapors    
bleed me into air    
fly me over sub-saharan africa & asia & antarctica  
explode me from the closet of my fears   
graffiti me out of doubt     
bend me like bamboo   
propose to me   
divorce me   
divide me into your spirit 2 spirit half spirit 
& shadow me  w/ fluttering tongues
& caresses  beyond head  
heart chakras   
fist smashing djembes   
between my hesitations    
haiku me into 17 bursts of blossoms & cold saki     
de-ethnicize me    
de-clothe me     
de-gender me in brassieres 
& prosthetic genitalias   
burn me on a brazier    
wearing a brassiere    
in bitch braggadocio soprano bass    
magnificat me in vespers 
of hallelujah & amen    
libate me in halos 
heal me in halls of femmy troubadors    
announcing my hiv status
or your status   
i am not afraid to love you     
implant dialects as if they were lilacs   
in my ear   
medicate me with a lick & a like
i am not afraid to love you   
so demand me       
reclaim me     
queerify me
 
  
-Regie Cabico   
  
Used by permission.
Photo by Les Talusan 
  

  
Regie Cabico  is one of the country's leading innovators and pioneers of poetry and spoken word, having won 3 top prizes in the 1993, 1994 & 1997 National Poetry Slams. Bust Magazine ranked him in the 100 Men We Love, and The Kenyon Review called him "the Lady Gaga of Poetry." He won a 2006 Best Performance Art Production award for his work on "Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind." He has appeared on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam and NPR's Snap Judgement. His work is published in over 40 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution, & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He has taught at Urban Word NYC, Poets House, Kundiman, and Split This Rock, and has served as faculty at Banff Arts Center's Spoken Word Program. Regie curates and co-hosts La Ti Do: A Weekly Cabaret & Spoken Word Series. He received the Writers for Writers Award for his work with at-risk youth from Poets and Writers. With Brittany Fonte, he co-edited a collection of North American and United Kingdom queer poetry, Flicker and Spark, a 2014 Lambda Literary Award Nominee for Best Anthology.

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If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive. 

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