If you would have told me fifteen years ago that I’d be releasing my first official single in 2026, I would have been skeptical. It’s not for a lack of determination. It just seemed quite improbable. If you’ve read any of my past work you understand why.

That’s the thing with art though, it never really leaves you. Even when you aren’t creating you are experiencing your moments of life, and if you are paying attention, you’re also experiencing art.

My upcoming song YRND is one of those creative moments.

I’ve been paralyzed by yearning before

I don’t think any human is a stranger to the ache of longing, even craving something out of reach, out of touch, out of this life perhaps. I am no longer young, but I still remember what those yearnings felt like.

I’m in my forties now, and I know that my yearning has evolved. I suppose if we are to mature and become wiser, it has to evolve. This brings me to my point.

I know what it feels like when you’re young, but now I also know it as an older person with more wisdom, more wholeness and grounding. Yeah, I may still experience yearning, but it no longer paralyzes me.

It becomes a reminder of what is precious and what is not

What I noticed most is, the things I yearned for before are not the things I do now. Instead of yearning for a person, or a nostalgic part of your life, you begin to understand that many things are meant to come for a time and then pass when the time is over.

Aging of all things will teach you to accept this. It is the only way to grow from your past yearnings, past lives.

I care deeply about things like building family stability, relationships that start with strong foundations, reputation, respect, peace and love that can outlive labels, contracts and societies. You can say, yearning has become a catalyst for my deep work. Not all things are within your power, but many things are and that is the whole point.

What yearning looks like for me now half way through my life

I think it requires teeth first of all. It begs for vulnerable honesty and the willingness to not repeat cycles that cause harm or losses. After all, we can all think of moments in our lives where our actions or inaction may have lost us something we cared about. Yearning now serves as an impetus to protect what I have built, created, nurtured and soothed.

Yearning for the things I deeply care about protect me from yearning for things I could lose, or things that can be out of reach.

Maturing puts you in a place where you can protect your cherished things. Maturing lets you experience what yearning is like when you are whole. It lets you experience the positive parts of yearning, the parts that demand growth. Sometimes that growth looks like breaking your silence. Acting. Doing. Creating. Explosive creativity. Remember, sometimes creating requires destroying too.

Such actions at times ask you to say it a little primal, authentic, honest, raw, bare and completely vulnerable. It is only then that the things you yearn for become the things you protect.

YRND will be released 6.12.26, thank you for your time.

There’s no room for careless error
I'm feeling these blessings gradual,
with everything I'm careful.

Circumspection isn't for the weak
but it's no longer tedious to me,
I swear it on everything I've sown
   everything I've grown.

There's room to bloom forever,
I know what it means to feel so free
formless and unnamed
  all of it
   weaved in
     purity.

There is too much to retell for this platform. I’d rather put it all into a book. I’ve been asked often throughout my life to write a book, and it is only until my forties where I have seriously considered it. Rightly so, I understand my past a lot better. The guilt I used to afflict myself with has been worked through. The anxiety I have carried for the majority of life still sits in my belly, but I am aware of it now. My body’s movements, and the way I breathe makes more sense. It doesn’t eliminate it, but I somehow manage peace within the chaos. Until I write a book, here are the concise tellings.

Destroying realities takes time, and lots of crying, especially when your reality is emotionally violent

I remember being a boy. I remember what it’s like. Ignorant and testosterone driven, natural hallmarks. Navigating life in my mid to late teens was an interesting transition of it’s own. I wasn’t even aware of what gender was yet, my mind was still youthful and shaped by others. What I was aware of was my looks, my apparent flaws in others eyes, my stature―easy to underestimate, but nonetheless prone to bullies. I was also very aware of constant danger.

Those years marked a period in the nineties where learning social cues was literally life or death. You ever try to navigate nineties Southern California hood-life as a teenager from a very small town?

It’s an autist’s social nightmare.

The nineties in my town was a hot bed of violence. The gangs were old, they were showing their age, and the last remnants of the OGs were still active. My generation were the next ones, the baby ganstas as Gangster Rap called it. To this day it is strange to encounter someone that did not experience this part of Southern California in the nineties. I experienced it within my first year of living here. I saw it. I heard it. I even felt it.

Days of depression and crying with a tough exterior were common occurrences for me. I wasn’t like them, the boys―the men that wanted me to adopt their ways.

At some point, after getting in trouble many times with both the school’s administration and with law enforcement I knew something had to change. I once spoke with an officer as he reviewed my school records. He was trying to figure out how I’d been in so much trouble and yet maintained good grades. The detective looked at me, then looked back down at the photos of evidence. This time they had busted me tagging the new clique. Last time it was for possession of controlled substance. In the future still, I would also get blamed for―as the officer put it “attempted murder.” That’s right. Little ol’ me. A hardened criminal.

Not really. It just looked that way on paper. This officer knew I was not fitting the profile. My grades, my well spoken demeanor, my sharpness, none of it spoke to him as “criminal.” After all, he asked me if I had hobbies. I said, music production.

They let me off with a warning.

I cried in private often, I didn’t want to be tough. I didn’t want to be seen as a criminal, my grandma didn’t raise me this way. She taught me manners, she taught me respect and hard work. So I began to slowly drift away from those friends. I started lifting weights more and then became friends with an unlikely person. A nerdy football jock, if you can even imagine that. The reality I was in, began to show stress. My life was at odds with who I really was.

It was 1999, the world may possibly end, let’s focus on music. Video games. My new jock friend slash closeted nerd.

Sometimes friendships bloom so deep that they change your trajectory and then they’re gone

It was a June. I was already married with two sons and one on the way. I was just beginning to figure out marriage, parenthood, and adulting. My nerdy jock friend would send me letters to keep in touch. I enjoyed those letters. His terrible grammar and handwriting, it made me smile. Somewhere thousands of miles away my friend was still there. He comes through in the form of scribbled out misspellings and water dried paper edges. He blamed his “shitty flashlight” and the damn rain leaking into his “shitty tent.” He was in the army now so it was all “military grade.”

I had started a family at a very young age, and he had gone to the military after we graduated high school. I still remember the day he broke the news to me. After all, he had told me he was going to be a cop or a fireman, not a soldier.

My friend leans in, he looked serious, I listened:

So I decided I am going to enlist.

―What! Why?!

It will help me get into a career as a cop easier

I remember not really supporting him, in retrospect I felt bad. I wanted him to change his mind. I cried. I hugged him, I told him I loved him for the first time ever. He looked at me in complete surprise to my reaction. He gave me a big hug. He told me he loved me too. He looked at me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “this is real, this right here, this is it.” He reassured me, our friendship was something real. We wept.

The moonlight, the weepy eyes, the closeness must have looked unusual to my friend’s dad. By then he had already pulled up, we hadn’t noticed.

When you fags decide you’re done I’m here!

We laugh. Nothing like sweet nineties homophobia to lighten the mood.

__It was June.

I was with my dad and brother at a dog show. We were watching a pitbull drag heavy weights across the park lawn. Their coats so shiny, their muscles so tight and toned. The chains tethered to the weights jangled.

It was June. An unusual phone call on an old Motorola. My dad tells us we gotta go now, quickly. We’re meeting up with family at my home? Why?

I can see my dad struggling. He is not a man of words. He is a man of action, and just like that as he’s driving us, he looks over to me and tells me my friend Lewis is gone. The ride home took decades. My reality devastated.

I learned about divination, and I practiced lucid dreaming because I wanted to see your face so bad

It’s still hard, I wont lie. Even writing that last paragraph hurt. I still miss him. I still miss having a friend like him. I still love him. I cried so hard in my living room. The details were vague. The military tends to do that.

It would be an understatement to say I sank into depression. It broke my world. Reality was staring at me through the cracks of my life. Cracks in my psyche.

I tried to drink it away, but that caused so many problems very quickly for me as you can imagine. I tried sleeping it away, but every single moment of sleep would be filled with dreams. Every single one of them, he was there but I never could see his face.

I often dreamed I was chasing him, or trying to find him. One dream I still remember vividly. It was a dream where I finally found him, and this time he didn’t slip my grasp. He stood there long enough for me to ask him where he’s been.

He tells me, I am so sorry. I have been alive this whole time, but I was on a top-secret assignment, I couldn’t tell you. I’m okay, I’m alive, I’m coming home soon.

I started crying out loud, I was happy, overwhelmed by the information but excited to tell others.

I wake up.

I take a moment. The small light I felt is quickly engulfed in darkness. My spouse, confused, attempting to comfort me. She knew what my dream was about.

By this time, I had already begun writing poetry again. Most of it was train of thought and cathartic. I wrote them as “keys” that would eventually become a layout of writings that would document my emotional and spiritual state during this time. I am looking at the archive as I write this, over twenty years later it is humbling to see my growth since then. The deep pain is still hard to read through. Here is a snippet of [key 5]:

The following month in October after writing [key 5], my son was born who we named after my friend Lewis. His parents gave us the blessing to do so. This reality shattered and tested me. It exposed me and forced me to stand up so I could take care of my family. I realized no matter how sad I was, it would not change anything by holding onto it, it would only harm me and my family. I eventually broke out of the cycle as I found better ways to cope with my grief. I joined a cult.

If you enjoyed reading this, please like and share. I will be working on Part Two this week

Moments earlier I had gotten caught in the forbidden chest, the one I was not allowed inside unless my uncles allowed. That chest, full of oddities and curious things I had never seen before.

Except this time I wasn’t scolded. In my hand I had a bag of glass stones with markings, they looked runic to me. I would stare at them through the sun in secret—holding the bag tight so as not to make noise. Out of all the curious things in there, the glassy stones drew me. They felt magical in my hand, I liked the weight.

—“¿Quieres aprender?”

Startled, grandma quietly standing behind me. I look at the bag and I say “¿aprender qué, ma?”

I’m not in trouble?

“¡A jugar canícas!” she tells me. I feel butterflies. She tells me to go outside before it gets too dark, and to find a place for us, she’ll meet me there.

I remember the pulsing of the ground I sat on. It felt powerful that night. Something was different.

Do you want to hear the rest of this story?

I hope it reaches those that find magic in life still. Let me first give you context, where it sits in my heart. In my bones. Things that were born from exile and ancestral struggle.

in Táyshaʼ where I played in the dust and thorny grass of my exiled ancestors

I don’t remember being born. Some people say they remember that. I imagine maybe it felt traumatic, very cold and loud. I do recall my life in Táyshaʼ however, and what parts of her I kept with me down to this day. That’s the part of being born I remember. The parts I can still tell.

Táyshaʼ during those days had magic that was raw, instinctual and present. I was born into the barrio and a tiny plot of land made of hard stone and chalky polvo. Arid, and if you had the water for it maybe a patch of grass. Either way, you will have chancaquías anywhere you step. Up close these stickers look like horned goats to me. This is the land I was born into. I will always remember El Rio Grande. That water knows the voice of our family, it knows my skin and it knows my fear.

This is the pueblo that also gave us many natural springs that I tasted, especially from the hose. The same springs that colonizers took and used to develop the town I was born in, San Felipe del Rio.

about The People of this land that walked on it long before I did

The colonizers called the land Tejas because they kept hearing the people use the word táyshaʼ which meant friend. The Spanish couldn’t say shh so they changed it to Tejas. Later, the American colonizers would change it to Texas and then drive my People out further into a nomadic life toward Mexico. The Kikapú originated from the Great Lakes after all.

The Kikapú were one of the last to resist assimilation and I keep that same spirit alive to this day.

However, the land was eventually stolen, pieced out like a good hunt, but done so greedily there was no room for others to also prosper. All of it was stolen with a pen and a gun.

The very land I grew up in has deep history for my ancestors. A lot of roots and magic exists there for us. Those lands still carry the bones of our generations. I can trace my blood to the place my grandmother was born. A Kikapú city Múzquiz, in Coahuila, Mexico. The place where her tribal lineage became severed due to poverty.

When I was a child I was taken to Múzquiz, I was there on that land. I ran barefooted on that land. The land our people were pushed in and out of in the early 1900s, it’s still there to tell its stories through magic.

a prince with the bones of a queen

I lived with my grandparents for a time. As a child I had a lot of freedom. I was well behaved. Matches in my pocket, no problem. At that time the barrio used to call me El Principe. The Prince. My grandmother gave me that title. Prince of what? I wasn’t sure yet but the barrio was my home.

It was through my grandmother I experienced many things for the first time. My first dress. My first smoke. My first many things. Including the magic I witnessed one twilight. That hour never left me.

living with my abuelos, the fragments and racism

For a while it was just me and my grandparents. My mom and my dad were traveling looking for work. For a period of time, they worked in the onion fields, like my grandparents who had picked potatoes and traveled wherever the work was, places where they would hire “wetbacks.” We all have many experiences dealing with racism, but it is all part of our ancestral struggle.

In spite of all this I was given a magical memory. It’s time to tell it.

My grandmother calls out to me and says, “¡ahí voy!” She’s ready.

There’s those butterflies again.

all her magic was in the rhythm of her walk and the intent of her finger

The polvo. Dust. Stoney ground.

Out of the shadows of rosebushes, a banana tree and the orange glow of the front door, she appears. Her gown is light, but the pattern has colors. Her colors. She’s barefoot.

Her feet get closer. She greets me but I hear it faintly. I feel her steps. I see the polvo puff up on every beat under her. Her gown, just above her ankles.

“¿Listo?” Ready?

I cross my legs and sit up. She sits opposite to me. Butterflies. The moon’s sheen, bluish on the fading shadows. She sees my attempt at a fire and says nothing. Her hand comes forward, I follow her finger, it meets the earth. She begins to draw a circle, the polvo rises up around her finger. It’s just like when she walked.

She reaches for the bag of magic glass and pours it into the circle. Glassy eyes open and gleam up at us. Butterflies.

I swallow. My breathing careful.

“Este es El Canicón.” She brings a larger steel marble up to my eyes. She lets me hold it, it’s heavier than the others. It feels respected. It feels like its purpose went far beyond a game. Like it used to be something else. It carried heavy memories. I gave it back.

She explains what El Canicón’s purpose is, and shows me its power. She places her thumb under her pointer and charges tension. She casts the stone and I see eyes scatter into starry galaxies. Some of them go beyond the orbit’s threshold. Beyond the line of a goddess.

She keeps those as her bounty.

It’s taken me about 4 years to really allow my voice to embrace its entire spectrum of registers and range. Sometimes I’ll sing in low chest voice with ranges in baritone, and other times I will slide into tenor, and push into a gritty head voice.

In this clip you’ll hear a tone that somehow developed while I tried to bridge my low vocals with my mix range. I am still figuring it out, but I am a lot more free. I have posted quite a few videos in my other platforms demonstrating my deeper fuller vocals, I’ll share that in another post. For now, I mostly want to focus on the lyrical content and it’s delivery.

on RX GOD, a heretical song

This song is lyrically dense in meaning and symbolism, RX GOD is a rebellious gospel if I had to describe it succinctly. A heretic’s song if you will, intentional apostasy for the sake of living, feeling present, being.

This clip is of verse 2 and chorus 2, but I think this section helps demonstrate my style and intensity. I tend to break out of a cage when I sing a climatic verse, because I lived everything I write about. I cannot present it any other way.

on verse 1 and how the song begins

The song starts in verse 1 describing “falling asleep” and waking up somewhere I do not recognize, a place where they feed you opium and violate your spirit. The first chorus comes in:

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Prayers never uttered, blood grace and water,
      turn to each other, love one another

Love one another. Almost like I want to believe the love is real, but I am not praying, something is bothering me. It doesn’t matter, “love one another.”

It starts quite deceptively, it feels like it’s going for a strictly rap-styled vibe, with some soul/R&B influence in the first chorus (not shown in video.) I break those frames in verse 2 as you can see, even bringing in distorted guitars and some drum work.

I find I like to present a lot of dualities in my art. It is always intentional, but it happens naturally with most things I create in any of my artforms.

on verse 2 and it’s climatic chorus 2

This section changes the song quite a bit and it surprised me when I got it here. It surprised me that it stepped away from becoming a song with some rap bars and an easy-to-bob-your-head-to vibe chorus. It brings energy and intensity weaving meanings within the lyrics. I lean into my gritty head mixed voice in this take.

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Give me honest love, fuck me to hell within this cell!

This verse begins what I see as the “apostasy” of the song’s nature. Where rebellion meets compliance. Where I speak truthfully and lean into my primal energy. This verse alone is demanding authenticity, even if it means hell.

I’ll let you digest the rest on your own. The song tends to land differently on different people I have shown it to that I know have experienced religious trauma. It depends on what part of your healing journey you are on, you may take the song as strictly rebellion, but if you’re further along, you may take it as a reminder of liberation and what it took you to get there.

I love writing songs.

prologue:

I have lived a life of danger ever since I was a child, it’s left me with what feels like a permanent sense of anxiousness for safety. Tonight, I was sitting with it, my eyes were welling up and I couldn’t understand why. I wanted to make a video about it for my other platforms.

After the third attempt to make the video, my composure just wasn’t staying, and the more time I spent with it the more I realized how much I’ve had to remain silent about and how much I’ve had to survive. How much I’ve had to fight death in the face of all things.

I breathe shallow, I breathe tense. My voice chokes. My eyes never rest, they chase everything. My ears never feel quiet. The ring. Loud screams. Loud bangs. Loud kicks to the dome. My ears still ring from it all and somehow I maintain an exhausting groundness. It is the best I can do.

I sat with it all for so long and my tears kept pooling like lakes without waves, bodies of water with dead stillness overfilling for no apparent reason, no ripples to mark their fall, just stillness. The stillness of life and death.

if I told you everything ma, it would pain you too much and I cannot bear to witness that

I can remember as far back when I was a little kid. Very little. He tried to kill me mama, and I did not understand why. His brothers killed the kittens I loved, and I figured he wanted to do the same to me. I can’t even describe the kittens to you mama, but it stayed with me, etched. Carved. Singed.

Mama, did you know about the time when I almost drowned? They saw them, holding me down, and they didn’t care. I said nothing. I stayed quiet like a mouse, quiet, so defenseless and easy to destroy.

Ma, you’ve told me this story many times, about when I was a child and I almost died in your arms; I never told you how I felt though, it would have pained you much more than what you saw. I didn’t tell you about the coldness. Did you know ma that the cold will blanket you like a thin blanket made of razors? You can’t tell if you are dying or coming to life, because it hurts, but at that moment, you are afraid of not feeling the pain, because your feet disappear. You see them. Barely, but they’re not there. That touch never left me, it left a mark that never went away.

Ma, I didn’t tell you what I had to do to survive, what the other kids just like me had to teach me so I could survive. I never told you why I had cuts on my hands, my face and elbows. I was a flower, fighting for my life and they trampled it many times, they hated flowers, ma. Especially the purple ones.

Ma, do you remember when I stood between the rage and you? I had gotten taller by then, but I was still insignificant. But I had learned how to bite back and not only bark. I had learned what it meant to survive by then ma. I made no threat to him, I simply gave you a warning to pass on because there would not ever be another warning. Did you see how I changed things? How I stopped something with my own hands? I learned to protect. I was tired of surviving.

Ma, the street taught me things I didn’t want to know, I didn’t know what else to do. My town knew my voice. Whenever I needed, she would hide me. I was hiding in her hills, do you remember looking for me? I’m sorry I worried you, but he was hunting me. My heart was racing, my vision was sharp and precise, you will never know how afraid I was. It would destroy you.

That’s why I learned to walk and talk like them. Men like them.

Ma, do you remember when my voice changed? When it felt like authority? Do you remember when the shift of my walk changed? The grace faded and the aggressive march began. I did not know what I was marching for, but my heels would hit the concrete harder than my toes. My hands became fists, and their delicate touch I had forgotten. You know what I had become, that is when my Voice became silent.

Do you remember almost a decade later when they put me in the white rooms? I never told you why, I told you the story that would keep me safe and not let you feel the pain. “It’s so I can get help, it’s okay ma.” I took their pills. I slept on their time. The man with the voices spoke about the Voices. I don’t know if he hurt me ma. I was a flower and I was put to sleep in the room alone with him. For fourteen days, I was put to sleep every night, at 7:30 PM. He was in a wheelchair, and he could still walk. I would lie facing away, until lights out and my eyes heavy would win.

Ma, for a brief moment, I knew someone I could trust. I made a phone call from there and she answered. She was not my lover she was not a fling, she was my only haven, she picked up the phone and knew it was me as she sighed in relief. Yes ma, I did love her, she made me feel safe. I am not sorry for that to this day.

I know how you raised me ma, but I did not feel safe in my home. It made me into someone else, someone feral and undisciplined with no partner I could trust as home. I was afraid of the knives in my home, ma. I was afraid of small glass items. I was afraid of everyone thinking the worst of me ma. I complied longer than I should have, until I remembered I had a bite. I was a flower, but I was on fire.

Ma the surviving hasn’t changed, the need for courage never waned. I am so tired, my armor is heavy and my blade blunted. My boots are uneven. My breathing is still shallow and stretched. Even now, someone hunts me. But this time, they hunt me because I chose to stay a flower, and now I have thorns, tougher stems and deeper roots. They think we do not belong on our lands, and they think your daughter is an abomination. Don’t worry, I’ll protect us like always. But, I’m just wondering—

when do I get to feel safe?

When do I get to feel held by someone who has my heart in mind? When can I let my heart rest and not feel the edge of betrayal wedging slowly in? I have not put down my tomahawk because I still cannot feel the grass of our lands under my feet. I see my feet, and they still don’t feel there.

Before I think of her body I inquire on her spirit
because I can tell when it's her
and when it's a different soul
that passes through the walls
of my ancient halls.

I can tell when her love has traveled far,
or if I am simply returning to what I'm yearning,
I know when she's someone else
unable to clearly see me
because I court all her tells.

There is a constancy of spirit that I always see,
and if I don't—I cannot bless her erōs 
so I resist returning pleasure sealed in dotes
until I know it's her who believes in hope.

I know a goddess when I feel one,
and I know her divinity in my bones
like a mortal's instincts for serenity
even on the days when I'm alone.

I practice tenderness and mastered patience
I keep wandering and evading the limerence
but there's hope that I still may find it 

but when I do
I know I'll stay silent.

I don't want to disturb a wild flower,
she smells nice on her own
and there's no reason I see
to call her away with me
into the night where I roam.

To my Dearest Virii,

I’m typing this the old way. The comms translation modules are offline right now. There isn’t much that stays consistent in this life after all. Maybe not even love. Still, I don’t make too much fuss. I love the wild nature of things and the chaos that begs for a name as it soars over plains. I know it’s seeking homes to call its own. I don’t mind becoming the teeth or at midnight a tender hand beneath. I’ll pull you out through windows and guide you through Blue Hills and over rocky dry meadows never seen.

I’ve had to see it change and as things went to waste. I was their goddess of Hope and Courage, and when I would speak from the depths they would hear the grit. Something like bird notes, a husky restrain without the grace. They called me Queen, they called me Kalypso the Sweet Queen.

I used to meet the goddesses of this land, and sometimes god-men. The god-men were selfish and wanted greed and drink, I slew most of them there in time through sex and poison magick, witchery and spells that I will not begin tell. Yet still many fled and hid themselves well, and to this day it’s lies that their ballads belt.

My sisters, many of them lost their minds, but more importantly—memory. Divinity faded, sincerity stolen and in me forever I would deeply know it.

Exiled, but I swore on their souls I would avenge them completely, I would hunt the god-men and grab their throats with my teeth given me. My tender hand would be brutal and merciless and I would not feel regret for the meting out of justice.

It’s been many thousands of years now. There are still five left, five of those god-men, wicked things they are, and I have been in pursuit through wood and stone, bronze and bone, even the wheel of long ago who’s cycles have gone digital in this age where there’s nothing spiritual.

I have only come this far for two things, to free you and to find them. You have grown up, I can’t teach you more but I will always love you dearly. I do hope to see you again, but as your goddess, I need to face what’s ahead and protect this city instead.

Virii, tell Haplo not to worry, I found them and I will eliminate them. Haplo knows how dangerous this is but I can’t ask them to come with me. I need to finish this or I will never feel at peace to be called your Queen. I am not your goddess as I am your servant, and I leave you now with my warmth and my raging courage.

I love you.

P.S. I left my monowire-mod in the armory. Please don’t cut yourself. It’s yours.

your digital mother,

KLYPS