The government asks me to "check one" if I want money.
I just laugh in their face and say,
"How can you ask me to be one race?"
I stand proudly before you a fierce Filipino
who knows how to belt hard-gospel songs
played to African drums at a Catholic mass --
and loving the music to suffering beats,
and lashes from men's eyes on the capitol streets --
South-East D.C., with its sleepy crime,
my mother nursed patients from seven to nine,
patients gray from the railroad
riding past civil rights
I walked their tracks when I entertained
them at the chapel and made their canes pillars
of percussion to my heavy gospel --
my comedy out-loud, laughing about, our shared,
stolen experiences in the South.
Would it surprise you if I told you my blood
was delivered from the North off Portuguese vessels
who gave me spiritual stones and the turn in my eyes --
my father's name when they conquered the Pacific Isles.
My hair is black and thick as 'negrito," growing abundant
as "sampaguita"-flowers defying civilization
like pilpino pygmies that dance in the mountain.
I could give you my epic about my ways of life or my look
and you want me to fill it in "one square box."
From what integer or shape do you count existing identities,
grant loans for the mind, or crayola white census sheets --
There's no "one-kind" to fill for anyone.
You tell me who I am, what gets the most money
and I'll sing that song like a one-man caravan.
I know arias from Naples, Tunis, and Accra --
lullabies from welfare, food-stamps, and nature
and you want me to sing one song?
I have danced jigs with Jim Crow and shuffled my hips
to a sonic guitar of Clapton and Hendrix,
waltzed with dead lovers, skipped to bamboo sticks,
balleted kabuki and mimed cathacali
arrivedercied-a-rumba and tapped Tin Pan Alley --
and you want me to dance the Bhagavad Gita
on a box too small for a thumbelina-thin diva?
I'll check "other," say artist,
that's who I am: a poet, a writer, a lover of man.
From Poetry into the Twenty-First Century
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