On Sunday, Monica, Allison and I had the honour of interviewing spoken word poet and disability activist Maria Palacios. She spoke candidly about the high rate of rape disabled women face, the challenges of raising children as a disabled mother, dealing with an abelist world and shared her latest poem with us. This was quite the honour as it was the first time that it had been publicly performed. You can find the episode on our show page at Blogtalkradio.
With her permission Maria has allowed me to post the poem though I really must recommend listening to the podcast, it was an incredible interview.
Hunger
Maria R. Palacios
The lovers
who blessed my life
have been many
and few...
many
who came like a breeze
and a few who stayed with ease
behind the scenes
of my life.
The ones who sailed through my ocean
came to the shore
like sailors in uniform.
They were never meant to stay
no matter what I might say
or how much I may claim
to love them.
They simply came
like an April moon
full
of promise of spring
the kind
that made my heart sing
as it broke.
Those are now the memories
that make me drink
and make me smoke.
Poem by poem,
metaphor by metaphor,
they bring out
the masochist in me,
the wild beast in me
the desperate lover
in me..
You know what I mean...
because no matter what,
all of us have once been
there.....
there....
in that desperate lover mode.....
when you want to be loved
by somebody
who doesn't
want
to
love
YOU,
and you lie in bed alone
staring at the phone
staring at the ceiling
watching
full episodes of your own life
wondering
if there will ever be
a next time....
No... I don't mean just sex....
I mean sex
with....
hunger,
the fire that devours you
makes you kiss and makes you claw
the flesh of a lover
over and over
because you have to hold on
to the memory of that body
next to yours...
...the memory
of that body
next
to
yours...
That
is the desperate lover mode.
Been there
too many times
sailing with some passionate stranger
until his sails follow the wind
to where my words
can't follow his
or wouldn't
even if they could.
Some things are not meant to be.
It truly is
as simple as that.
Then.....
there are the lovers who stayed
for some time
and
for a lifetime
because everyone I once loved,
I still love
just not with the same passion
as before.
Most
of the lovers who stayed
brought peaceful love,
filled my life and my bed
with the comfort of routine,
we boxed ourselves in
into twice a week sex,
and moved on day to day
in a monogamous wheel
one that involved more than sex
it brought worries and bills,
the “Not tonight I have a
headache” line
in my pocket
my “get out of jail free card”,
the absence of romance,
table never just set for two,
no candlelight
no full moon
but the security of someone's arms
that kept me warm at night
and made me feel
like a “real” woman.
Yes, a real woman. Real as defined by a culture,
that sees someone like me
as the black sheep of the family,
the one
with a dark past
and a dark side,
the one who has loved
more than once
and lived
intensely,
the hot-blooded Latina
who broke the mold
of the perfect daughter
and the perfect wife,
the perfect woman,
perfect this and that
all women are expected to be
somehow.
Yes.
Somehow
we manage to squeeze
our battered identities
into yet another outfit of preconceived ideas
about what roles we play
and what we say....Who are we?
And why
are we
here?.....
And we swim upstream
like a desperate sperm
trying our best
to survive.
But we're always
too fat
to thin
to white
too dark
to short
to tall
to old
too young
too something
What the hell is wrong
with us?
I guess,
in my case,
I was considered too crippled
for some things
I was never expected to grow up.
“You?
Sex education?
For what?????”
And so I learned to exist
on my own.
And on my own
I learned
about sex and love
and confused the two
at times
as I was forced to wear
labels that define womanhood
in the white, able-bodied, heterosexual
socially acceptable way
and I was raised to believe
I will never have sex
never get married
never have children
never grow up to be
a “real”
woman.
But I am one.
And I have never been
the sweet little thing,
breakable, fragile, helpless
needy female
waiting to be rescued
by anyone
but especially
by a man.
Instead I am
feminista
revolucionaria
Pancha Villa
Female Chegue Vara
Woman of color
who has grown poems
and children
in her womb....
...poems
and
children
in
her
womb.
So.... the girl in a chair had a lover
then a husband
and
another
She had one child
then two
It sounds like the same old tune
because I'm just a woman
doing
what women do
loving
like women love
with all my senses raw
until the hunger
is gone.
