The calling came to me while I languished
in my room, while I whittled away my youth
in jail cells and damp barrio fields.
It brought me to life, out of captivity,
in a street-scarred and tattooed place
I called body.
Until then I waited silently,
a deafening clamor in my head,
but voiceless to all around,
hidden from America’s eyes,
a brown boy without a name,
I would sing into a solitary
tape recorder, music never to be heard.
I would write my thoughts
in scrambled English;
I would take photos in my mind
—plan out new parks, bushy green, concrete free,
new places to play and think.
Waiting. Then it came. The calling.
It brought me out of my room.
It forced me to escape night captors
in street prisons.
It called me to war, to be writer,
to be scientist and march with the soldiers
of change.
It called me from the shadows, out of the wreckage
of my barrio—from among those
who did not exist.
I waited all of 16 years for this time.
Somehow, unexpected, I was called.