Kai Coggin

Click on the link to read my newest poem, dedicated to the children of #peshawar. #PeshawarAttack #Pakistan http://www.elephantjournal.com/2014/12/planting-an-acorn-after-a-massacre-poem/

A @jeremy_rodgers_photography shot that didn't make it into Hot Springs Hot Spots Magazine with my November interview. I love it. #periscopeheart #poetlife ❤️

🎼 She builds me bookcases, for all my books... She builds me bookcases. 📕📗📘📙📔📓 #shekeepsmewarm #poetlife

🎼 She builds me bookcases, for all my books... She builds me bookcases. 📕📗📘📙📔📓 #shekeepsmewarm #poetlife

There is freedom in the process of a poem, freedom in the silence between sounds, freedom in the finding, a count down of divine timing where thoughts and words pour forth from inner well-spring of - “Look at this moment, taste it, smell it, feel it in your fingers, write it into poetry, eternalize it as LIFE, in the minutest of beauties, to the expanse of a million infinities, create its movement inside you, dance in the ecstasy of falling in love, swirl in the brilliance of a muse’s fluttering heart, birthed from a thousand kisses and the breaths between I love you’s, then, cloak yourself in the abyss of everything heartache, the loss, the anger, the grief, the death. With all of that, write poems that stand as towers, as lighthouses, as stars, as the sun.” never being at a loss for words. I am a woman pregnant with poems, my womb is a drum full of heartbeats, at any moment, my water could break, and my dammed up words will make oceans.

If by “goodbye,” you mean come back to the beauty that we had before this escaping, this falling, then I say hello. If by “forgive me,” you mean let’s sweep up all the pieces that I left broken at your feet, then I forgive you. If by “I’m sorry,” you mean take this tooth and nail, and with it build the semblance of wings, then I am sorry, too. If by “thank you,” you mean my shadows have turned to gold, and the dawn no longer fades from my mouth, then you are welcome. If by “I love you,” you mean there is an opening in a wall that only my light can sing through, then I sing I love you, too. If words are like actions completed in our minds, let my words only be sunrises, let my words only be green with spring, let my thoughts only sound like rivers returning home, let my desires only be the filling up of a cup that we both make with our hands, let my actions only be the reflection of the sun on the surface of a rippling lake, so bright, it illumines the underground of my being.

I contemplated Orion tonight, perched high at the midpoint of night, stretching out his arms and legs into infinity, the one, two, three belted perfection, Kings in a line. How is it, out of all those stars, in all that seeming chaos and frenzied light, in all that expanse of untouchable space, how is it, that there is that one, two, three perfect line of light in the winter’s night sky? The evenly spaced ellipsis written by the hand of God, an unfinished thought . . . a wait, there is more to come . . . a star sentence that trails off into silence . . .

So many times in my life, I have screamed an unquenchable longing into the darkness of a night with no name, a longing to uncover the beginning, the end, the nonexistence of either, the completeness of incompletion, the being complete in everything that is and is not, I longed for the Truth about all things, and longed for an answer that requires no words. A longing like this does not let me sleep when the whole world is sleeping, when talk of souls meets rolling eyes and closed minds, this longing is consciousness opening like a flower bud into springtime air, this longing continuously shakes the fog of numbness and pain from the veiled windows of my eyes, and shows me that I AM, in fact, Awake. My purpose is a Torch, a glowing flame on the planet of too much suffering. My struggle is a Beacon, a lighthouse beam into the darkness of an empty ocean’s night. My heart is a Rainbow, prismatic in reflections of understanding that pour from its bent-backward arch across the blue sky morning. My eyes are Supernovas, seeing through to the quintessence in each body holding a soul. I know your vessels, I know what chaos looks like, I know the calm also comes after a storm, I know the bodies don’t fit sometimes, it is easy to clothe yourself in everything that ever hurt, I know it is not easy, but let it go, shed your skins, regenerate, let it go, cooperate with all that is pulsing around you in the symbiotic dance of light and dark, the marriage of opposites, the eternal story that you are writing yourself into, the journey of your everliving soul, the black and white checkered floor that leads to a door, open it, come back again and stand in my smile, bend the bars around your heart, it is worth it, to finally FEEL. FEEL ME. My feet have walked this path many times, my soles remember the stones and the places where the oceans meet. I have been tide-swept into greatness, but don’t think I haven’t almost died drowning. My hands come together to form infinity because my body is a closed circuit and I am made of light. My drumbeat chest recognizes the rhythms in the steps of my fellow travelers, children of the stars, lovers of the moon, keepers, seers,   doers, we meet again, and again, dear friends, another day, another life, I remember you without words. Our lives are how we know each other. Our lips and tongues speak in flames. Our eyes have seen the horizon of a world in the making. We are synonymous with Light. We are, I AM. We are, I AM.

I am speaking sounds into the universe from             the                  edge                      of                          a                                         BLACK HOLE a dream in a                 v   a     c       u         u            m                  , My body stretches across a mathematical anomaly, straddles the cusp of the inescapable event horizon, the absorption of any and all matter and light, black-hole-speak for point of no return. Not even the gravitational pull of my Jupiter Heart can save the stars whizzing by into nothingness, beams of fire that fade into the cosmic silence of this gaping black mouth, bodies of light that lose the properties that make them light, once they are pulled into the threshold of the horizon, the “black hole information loss paradox.” My moonbeam hands pull at the tides of space but cannot pull the light out of this massive stellar consumption, the chaos and symmetry of a universe folding in on itself, the bending of planetary trajectories, the swallowing of stars, the digestion of milky firmament, the arcing of covenants, God’s Laws revealing their inconsistencies and delicate imbalance. I do not get pulled in completely, my bodies  s  t  r  e  t  c  h but I have my own orbit, merely a phenomenon watcher attempting definition of undefinable, wanting to fly into the vacuum to be born on the other side of space, but keeping vigil on the cusp of realities and dreams. I whisper a nebula from my ancient tongue, a sigh of star dust from an inner cave that holds my Soul, a vibration that only the Light in me understands, only the OM that makes up my bones realizes as saving grace, and the pull of the black hole releases me. I am no longer proton, neutron, electron, I am beyond light and matter, just Golden Transcending, just independent radiant flight, a shooting star, a fiery comet, a new-born galaxy whirling trailblazer night-writer of light in the sky. I become my own universe, an everlasting song in the cosmos, a vibration that ripples infinitely, infinity. Inside us all, there is a charge that is beyond positive and negative, there is a frequency that ignites Divine, there is the AUM that built your bones, there is a blast of a brilliant supernova that sparks from the calm of a pure Heart linked with the Heart of the Sun, and when you are standing on    the        edge             of                       a                                                 BLACK HOLE and every bit of light in you is draining into abysmal f o r g  e  t  t  i  n  g  , Call on your Inner Fire. Call on the intonations of your own Soul. Remember your own Brilliance and Beauty. Remember Who You Are. We are born of moments and lifetimes, reciprocated energies, recapitulated spirals of learning and detaching, momentary relapses of pain and new life hatching. We are Spiritual Beings in human bodies. We are Celestial Bodies in limited skies, but we must never fail to realize there is a purpose to all of this; There is a New World on the Horizon, and we are building it.

When I was 18, I got a tattoo of the Chinese character for “Happiness” on my right shoulder blade. I was a depressed kid, too many years dressed as a dark cloud. Tattooing “Happiness” onto my body made it mine. Forever. It might really say “Pork” or “Kiss Me” or “Stupid Americans” because who really knows anyway? ... except the Chinese. Either way, Happiness is behind me and in a language I don’t understand.

I keep chopping, splitting.  It is all cyclical. This is what going back to the source looks like. My left arm becomes a cradle for split logs, firewood load that I bring up to the porch and put in the basket outside by the door, the basket of split logs and kindling that is fireplace bound, the spirit of trees that will keep us warm tonight. The logs sing a song of crackling when they burn, sometimes they whistle, not quite cured for perfect burning but warm just the same. As the flames dance around the sticks and split logs, I thank them for what they give, what they have given, for the life that they lived as a tree, and for the ashes that they will become. Tomorrow we will shovel the ashes out of the fireplace and put them in a bucket with the few cinders that did not burn. We will dump the ashes back onto the earth, after a couple of days, the ashes of split logs will become one with the dirt, it will fertilize the dirt that will birth wildflowers come Spring. This is what going back to the Source looks like.

seeing as Soul, it is consciousness that remains nameless, but we have all felt it, haven’t we? When a moment unfolds and shakes you from the numbness, and you know you have been here before,     you know, for a moment, you are where you should be.

When I was a high school English Teacher, one of my most important lessons was “Abolish the ‘N’ Word,” my bravest days, were the days I unpacked the word “Nigger” for my mostly black and brown students and spelled it out on the whiteboard in black dry-erase marker, N I G G E R the word resonating off the reflective fluorescent lights, a billboard of quiet horror, hoping to shock, hoping to understand, hoping to enlighten, hoping to drop the words from their mouths, fallen forgiven tongues. Do not attempt this exercise if you did not walk the same streets, if there is not a gun shot  or gang sign or drive-by under your teacher belt, if your students don’t trust you, if experience is not holstered to your hip like gold, and you cannot spell blood with your fingers. What do I know of “Nigger” to be able to write it in my own hand? With the stroke of my own tongue, “Today, we are going to talk about the word Nigger.” I said it out loud when the students first sat down, their shock and intrigue permeating the chatter, their eyes meeting the word face to face in front of them. Moments before, in the hallway, the same word flowed so easily off their tongues, like exclamation points ending every sentence spit from their sharpened lips, that they did not even flinch anymore, like the word was not a dagger, like the word was not brought over tied to a slave, tied to a boat. Discussion opened. They repeated the same story in every class, “Nah, miss, Nigga is different from Nigger.” “Is it?” I asked. Is there not a history that is pulled like a dragging chain with every utterance of that word? Does that word not hang from the end of a noose, choking, gasping for one more breath? Is that word not whipped into the backs of every slave boy, and raped into the screams of young slave girls? I showed them a slideshow on lynching. They already knew the letter K. We listened to “Strange Fruit,” and when they realized what blood on the leaves was implying, a few hung their heads down, one cried. We read and analyzed “I Have A Dream” for it’s figurative language, for its power in repetition, for its penetrating metaphors and symbolism, found reasons for its transformative and lasting impression, and they began to realize “Nigga” and “Nigger” were cousins that were too closely related to forget where they came from. Isadora Indiana Jones was a transfer student that blew in from New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina. She challenged my sanity and self-control when, in the middle of Dr. King’s speech, she yelled, “Who cares about saying Nigga?!” It was the way she said the word that made it linger in the air, her face twisted, eyebrow cocked, her big lips curled in a fit of disapproval with my white-sounding mouth. I still hear it in slow-motion in my memory. “Martin Luther King a Nigga. I’m a Nigga. She’s a Nigga. We ALL Niggas.” I screamed, “STOP!” Something took over me, my fight or flight was looking more like FIGHT and I wanted to actually slap her. I went out into the hallway and punched the wall, my knuckles making an impression on a “Just Say No” poster. I walked back in to their stunned faces. It was the only time I was visibly upset, the only time I almost wanted to just say, “fuck it, keep the fucking word, taste the sweat and blood and burning of its history, and label it friend, label it homeboy, without ever realizing what you are actually saying.” I didn’t. I didn’t give up. I would not stand for the burning of a bridge I was using my heart to build. By the end of the week, 237 students signed a pledge to Abolish the N Word, to stop saying it around their friends, to tell their friends and families that dropping an “-er” and adding an “-a” does not dismiss hundreds of years of oppression, does still sound like chains. The next week, more made the pledge. They learned a LIFE lesson. These are the hardest lessons to teach. These are the lessons that are not in the suggested syllabus. These are the lessons that Teachers do not get paid enough for, but the lessons that ultimately mean the most. I risked my job doing this lesson. I dropped a pebble into the gaping black mouth of history, and tried to make sense of it all, just using my heart, just using the hope I had for their futures. In the end, they learned there are many other ways to say friend.

Sometimes, I scare myself. I see that anger has been a meal that I have gotten used to swallowing down, and when I least suspect it, it finds a way of coming back up, like overfilling the gas tank in the car and gasoline spews all down the side of it, and everything smells like gasoline, the noxious fumes swimming thick around the air waiting anxiously for a spark. I am the matchstick. 
 With pull of emotional trigger, fire pours from my unbridled mouth, everything burns, turns to cinder and ash, my bare feet trailing blackened soot footprints into tomorrow’s memories that have yet to be made, but that are laced with those fumes, the lingering scent of anger burning.
 Now, I am an empty cavern, inside                        echoes, no more swallowing ghosts.

I looked up metaphor in the dictionary. It spoke unclearly, whispered a comparison that sounded like simile but wasn’t, was more is and are and being, the skylight blinking, the moon humming a wet tune of tiding, the murmuration of birds that my soul becomes if I let it, the hiding sun lifting an eclipsing veil to reveal the glory of unbridled light in a smile over a desolate field at dawn, this is metaphor but I have not mingled in metaphor, no, not in a while, not since the last time I fell in love, and falling felt like flying, not falling, when I tripped and tumbled over the blazing hyperbole of what our love was when the fires inside were first lit by divine coincidence, and the volcanic embers of our hearts’ heat could summon a wildfire from spark that all the water in the ocean could not smite, if the wind blew us right, blew a breeze against her skin that reminded me of what her kiss might feel like, and that ember would suddenly... ignite. The poetic devices of love, tools of expression that I wear like wings, wings that never lose their feathers or forget that falling can feel like flying if you open yourself up and become a star.



Sonya, Sun ya, Sun that you are in a world that thrives on darkness, you are a mirror in a filled room who asks us all to dance with the shame inside us, take our self-hate and spin it in our arms in new joy until it becomes self-LOVE, until it becomes a smile, a reflected rainbow that pours out of our mouths and arches back into our hearts. Radical Self-love. Unapologetic. These words might as well have been another language, a foreign tongue that I had never heard, a concept that I had never taken in until you shined like a SUN on an LA stage, and the Universe put me there in that moment, to be reflected off your glorious bald head and bold gorgeous mouth, and my uterus applauded for the first time ever. What a Revolution! What a Catalyst you are for people all over the world. The Body is Not an Apology. And you are the unapologetic song of TRUTH and FIRE, and HUMILITY, and RIGHTEOUSNESS. Sonya, you SUN, today you are more Golden than my eyes and heart can handle because everyone who knows you is taking a moment to reflect on the BEAUTY and COURAGE that you inspire in their lives. When my mirror is a lonely bad picture, I think of you, and your colors, your shining truth, your dressed-to-the-nines armor of DIVA, and I look into my eyes and breathe in I Love You. *This poem is dedicated to Sonya Renee Taylor, a champion of my heart.

He walked by the front of my car as I pulled into a parking spot at the gas station, I noticed him only in that I saw him for a moment, an image passing by, his old weathered black skin, frayed woodland camouflage BDU jacket, light brown hat, dirty blue jeans, white furrowed eyebrows and blank eyes, forgotten man’s army. He stayed outside. I went into the store, smiled at the large young black girl behind the register, fire-engine red extensions draped braided curtain tassels across the left side of her chest, her gleaming white name tag, SHANIQUA in bold black marker, on the other side of her chest, her bumblebee eyes everywhere, her thoughts on another place, another time, but her body going through the motions of monotone “Will that be all for you?” and “Have a nice day”. I got my goods and brought them up to the register, where another cashier had joined the fire-engine. JAMILA. They talked amongst themselves as I put the six-pack of beer and bottle of water on the counter. “Girl, that crazy old man is out there again.” “Damn.  He was here yesterday, too.  He need to go home.” The jingle bell of the door opening signaled me to turn around to see the weathered old man cautiously walking to the counter. As his feet dragged in toward her, Jamila accidentally dropped her barcode scanning laser gun, the spirally cord dangling it over the counter as it crashed onto the floor in front of the old man. He walked in. She dropped her gun. His camouflage did not hide him. “Why you make me do that, Willy?” I looked at her as she gave me a smile like, “look how crazy this man is.” I glanced at the fire-engine haired girl, as she lackadaisically scanned my two items, unresponsive. Camouflage Willy picked up the scanner gun in his jittery ashen hands, and put it up on the counter, an imposed silence covered him, no words were fast enough for him to make, misfiring between his mind and his mouth, slow-trigger-tongue. Her semi-automatic rapid-fire questions: “Why you make me do that, Willy?” You so crazy, Willy, why you make me do that? Thank you, Willy. Why don’t you just go home, Willy? You just crazy. Hey, Willy, is you a veteran? Cuz if you a veteran, you can have a free cup of coffee today. Is you a veteran, Willy?” I stood in a frozen state, watching this all unfold in the few seconds that it took, unfolding the one-dollar-bills I had taken out of my pocket, counting out the 11 dollars and change, as Willy finally said... “Yes. . .  Veteran.” Indifferently, she handed him the small white styrofoam cup, rolling her eyes to the fire-engine girl taking my cash. They both chuckled. “One cup, Willy. You heard me? One cup. Don’t be tryna get seven cups and be all abusing the system, Willy. One!” He was already at the coffee machine, filling up his one free cup of coffee, looking for a small bit of warmth a taste of comfort. I don’t know his story. I don’t know the wars that he fought, but I saw the waging battle against him today, live rounds of disrespect fired at him, the cashier dropped her (scanning) gun when he walked in, but her deadliest weapons were in the condescending intonations of her words, in the way that she handed him the small styrofoam cup without looking at him, the shaking of her head and the smack of her tongue, her actions, weapons of man’s destruction. I wish I would have said something, given him a couple of bucks or a hug, bought him another cup of coffee or lunch. I wish I would have given those heartless girls a piece of my mind. I don’t know why I walked out of the gas station store, heard the jingle bell slam back against the glass, got in my car, and just drove away. Apathy is also a weapon, and I want to lay my guns down.