"Home Invasion" is a love poem to the wonders of the city and countryside that stole his heart. Now how can Hollywood compete with that?

Hakim Bellamy is a two-time National Champion in the Poetry Slam scene. He was a member of the 2005 National Poetry Slam Champs Team Albuquerque in his first year of poetry slam. The following year he was a member of the 2006 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational Champs Team UNM. He has won the City Grand Slam Championship in Albuquerque (2005) and in Silver City (2008) as well as 3 consecutive University of New Mexico LOBOSLAM titles. His poetry has been published in Albuquerque inner-city buses as a winner of the RouteWords Competition (2005). His poetry has also been published in the Harwood Anthology (2006), the Earthships Anthology (2007), Sin Fronteras Journal (2008), A Bigger Boat published by UNM Press (2008) and Looking Back at Place (2008). In January of last year, Bellamy was recognized as an honorable mention for the University of New Mexico Paul Bartlett Re Peace Prize for his work as a community organizer and journalist.

He is also on MySpace.



Home Invasion


It ain’t the sky
The sky with its personality, limitless
Knows no boundaries
No left or right
No east or west
No up or down
Just light and dark
But not my darkest moments
Nor my lightest pocket
Could buy the narrowest slither of the sky’s vast currency

It ain’t the crest
Threatening to eat the city I packed for lunch
Passing as a monument to the great Tsunami
However more rough around the edges
Shifty as a boulder
More costumes than aliases
A beach wearing more varieties of watercolors than species of melon

By morning
Cantaloupe rind, grainy with the sun behind it
Spanish Carribean
By lunch,
Honeydew
At some elevations,
Morning frost, snow sands
By dusk,
Sandia red, three abysses deep

Her mountains never run out of charm
Her peaks never underdressed
A sore thumb costume
Trying to masquerade a burglarized horizon
With an infinite supply of recognizable disguises

It sure ain’t the horizon
Even if it wasn’t hiding
Even if you could see it…you couldn’t see it end
A mirage
A scam
The illusion of paradise
Heaven just around the bend
Right there
Where the sky and the desert make out
Just beyond your reach

Get a hundred feet closer
It dances a hundred feet further
Faster than uncaught breath
Slipping over the unattainable like belly beads in the valley’s abdomen

Uncatchable
Like 24 karats at the end of a fishing line stick
Taunting a thoroughbred mesa to chase it
A precious race to be the crown jewel of the desert
When it was the perfect heist the whole time
She disappears at night
Returns in the morning, no explanation of where she’s been

It ain’t the dirt
That ends up in the eyes of every fair fight
That soils the shoes of an honest day’s work
That coats the dishonest tires of a stolen car, but never the wax job

It ain’t the adobe that hitchhikes the fingernails of the potter to germ food
Just as it ain’t the soil that bathed the germination to create it

The dirt that hues the majestic skin of the desert and its people
The same reddish-brown that camouflages it
Unable to see it
From Bosque to steeple
South Valley barrios to Cedar Crest
Both eyes are peeled curtains at Burque’s Hollywood Premiere
Here?

Yes, here.
In an environment where moving pictures can’t compete with the sky
The crest, the horizon, the dirt, the real
When plagiarized histories miseducated me, reel deserts…
Have gypsies, caravan-jackings and black market organs
Or black market orphans

And some people actually believe all of this
Me?
I believe none, but I’ll tell you what…
It wasn’t any one who stole my heart
It was a “baadasssss” city…
…combing the desert to make a nest for his sun


© Hakim Bellamy October 5th, 2007