because we'll never know the rest of the way

i wonder how it will be meeting you again
the world is not that large
it is small enough

chances are

we might come across each other again
i know i wouldn't know
what to make of it

chances are

you will appear indifferent exactly the way
versions of you did in
survival stories

something over

the many other lovers left in your wake
because i wasn't blind all along
because neither of us were blind

we knew all along, it was over
chances are

we knew all along, it would be over
chances are

we knew we wouldn't be over.

Never enough time

Never enough time to be a mother
Never enough time to be a father
Never enough time for a child
Who grows out of itself by tomorrow

The child will be gone
Replaced by a woman
Replaced by a man
Replaced by a stranger 
Come tomorrow

Never enough time to be wife
Never enough to be husband
To be lover 
To be child
To be constant
Come tomorrow

Come tomorrow
Come stranger

Who does not fear tomorrow?

among the lasts

Let me tell you about my restlessness, the uncertainty
of my leaving because dearly I wanted to that I am 
afraid the dividing line that will be the news. Two worlds.

At the moment, there is nothing beyond September
those days that are steps toward a cliff of two bridges
one must I take given the word. What word. Not one 

of us now says a thing, both waiting, while things away
making endless strings of short travels: points A to B;
A to C; A to D etcetera where the sea is a moving part.

Roger says I am ready now, I am. Am I? Of course,
there is no better time than now. This year no longer
than necessarily so being a turnstile in the middle

this road that is now as lived. We do not say what needs
not be said. I hold you close in mornings that I repeatedly
memorize even as I know I cannot forget.

The Poor

Who are the poor? It depends
who is defining the abstruse lot
that continually grows
no end, all children
of an absentee god.

The ways we go

Two nights ago, I dreamed of pulling a tooth---
two, an incisor and a molar.  There would have been
third, but in the dream it stopped being loose---

and I woke up distraught.  Dreams of teeth

are not good in this country of dreamers, they mean
death.  I spent the rest of the hours watching
for light.  Morning, she tells me, 

death in the family, but it could also mean simply

change

exactly the way I was told the first time
a reader explained the cards before reading.
A transition, she had said, gesturing at a cup.

What do I know?  What do I know?

I called my mother in the dark of morning
she replied, pray.
In the corner I watch the stillness and the quiet

Who knows?  Who knows?

J-- had a stroke of luck right after our meeting, 
and passed away.  A woman with terminal cancer
brought her oxygen tank to listen to a poetry reading.

The Danish neighbour hit the truck at the freeway

the same day my new motorcycle arrived.
His wife and months-old child I had greeted just that morning,
and she had spoken kindly to the dogs.

Who knows?  Who knows?

There is an envelope upstairs waiting for the last paper.
There could be a leaving, but do I dare 
finally go?

Exactitude

Is it possible to know what we want?
Don't we still get ahead of ourselves
not at all unlike

a five-year-old child who thinks it knows
what it wants, if only for a moment
an hour, a minute 

before it finds itself wanting something else
yet again.  How we spent years trying
exactitude.  I think I know

as I've been taught, and learned:
to envision the map, to draw it carefully 
as a CV, a bio, a folder of

accomplishments, works in progress and 
downplayed failures, silent emptinesses.
And when the map

is finally done and we stand right at mark
the middle of X, we find ourselves:
the audacious asking:

do you really know what you want?

consider utopia

Consider utopia and how it exists
only in the mind.  An elaborate system
fallible when set into form.  Governments
that rise and fall, imperfectly perfect
people with souls greater than their selves.

If we all are a reincarnate of previous 
souls or dust flecks from stars, are we all
but mere refuse
from utopia?








shane

after city

The children are dead.
The news does not say
even though their bodies
are all around.  In parts,
in missing wholes.
The entire city has begun
to smell of loss.  There are 
arms, dismembered, waving
at Red Cross trucks carrying relief.
Too many bare feet, caught 
cold in the act of running.
Everybody is howling.
But there are not enough names.

At the centers, the lines are long
for food, for water, for medicine.
Also for calling God.
But the telecommunications 
are all down.  
And the entire city is dark.








(Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, Philippines)
 







by shane

rocks, water, light

photo by A.L. Abanes (may you and your family be safe)

at what point the anger? 

the resignation, the calm? 

how aptly it was said: 

when you know the storm is coming, 

the quiet has a shimmer. 

and shimmer it did; and Haiyan 

took many lives: children, 

men, women.  

no mention of countless pets,

no word about lovers

only strangers with unknown names

in a city nearly wiped unrecognizable.

was it only half a year ago i came 

backpacked to visit and stand

to admire the sunset at their pier?

no news, only reports of dead 
bodies in evacuation centers,

trying to explain the unknowing-ness

of storm surges. of divine plans.

but the footage of a man

the body of his six-year-old 

daughter in his arms, cold.

a shimmering light with it all.

  

astrology

1.  maybe it is in our nature to wait--though the word nature is a loaded word and subject to arguments.  maybe we have the tendency to wait.  to while away our time waiting for something by living.  in any case, maybe we all are waiting for Godot.  who can tell.  and who can say otherwise.  there are some things we know are coming.  the inevitable.  only we don't know the when.

2.  B* passed away.  the dog of some years.  kidney failed.  there is a sense of emptiness in the house.

3.  there are many things we know, but do not think about.  the end of the world, for example.

4.  JJW reads signs in the zodiac.  a feat he showed the first time in B*.  foggy night and the group was smoking and suddenly he said "you're a ----" from out the blue.  an uncanny ability to read the signs of people.  everyone's zodiacs were guessed right.  including a brief description of the you.  and what signs were compatible with you.  and what signs would be bad for you.  i wondered:  do you right away read the person in front of you; can you right away read the lover for you.

5.  JJW recently posted a photo smiling by the Mona Lisa.















 

ferris wheel

you've never been in a ferris wheel.  and so one night we stopped at a quaint carnival in a pocket in the city and i said let's take a ride.  you were scared, and i pretended not to.  not because i was afraid of heights, but because the carnival was old, all the rides, rusty.  risky.  not unlikely that any moment something would break, people would fall.  always a third world phenomenon.  but that night, we must have been feeling brave.  you held my hand as we stepped into a cage.  the cage was closed and it felt what pigeons must feel as the wheel began to be turned and the cage was raised.  there were sounds of old machinery, sore, arthritic, beyond retirement.  still, the wheel turned and turned, faster and faster, and we saw only glimpses of stars and parts of the city made strange.  and as you held my hand conquering your fear, i try not to think of metals rods breaking, the bones of the wheel collapsing under the weight of young lovers' dreams.

flooding in another city

almost a week now national news tell nothing new:  flood and flooding somewhere:  the southwest monsoon; torrential rains; collapsed dykes and dams; overflowed rivers; and waves after waves of mudwaters having made their ways to the cities, mudwaters with the strength of twenty or more feet deep burying roads and cars and trucks and houses.  boats hovered by houses' roofs.  no Ark.  and crowding at the centers, the countless evacuees.

the local news tell a different story:  the collision of an oil tanker and a passenger boat.  more than two hundred missing.  a pregnant woman found floating at sea.  and that it has been more than seventy-two hours and so operations have changed from search-and-rescue to search-and-retrieval.  

government, as expected, is diligent on working on blame and accountability: they are out looking for a woman believed to have siphoned money.

the champion church is doing nothing.  while all the weather forecasters tell everyone to continue expecting rain.

but in this place, how the full moon shines quiet and bright.  i try.  the airline tickets lying in wait.














 

to believe again

the exact moment of your coming of age, do you remember? the moment when 
the rosy scales from your eyes fell
and your heart grew a stone
and you finally see

the world is not what you once thought it to be?



                                                                   --on reading college freshmen essays

what is the Golden Fleece?

The lost
The seeking
Argonaut


At the end of each day's hours, in a world's corner where we retreat  to hide at our most vulnerable time, at that most peculiar instance of only a few breath spaces long between waking and sleeping, 

We do sometimes remember.  
And see this strange world as it is: 

A large labyrinth city where we, the argonauts, seeking the fleece, have gone lost, 

Trapped in between sky high walls
working hours
job descriptions
streets, society, and survival.

Perhaps, the minotaur is no beast, no Other, 

But Us,

Who, having lived longer 
 

And longer in this maze 
have turned into 
memory-less beasts.


Where is the skein of thread?
Where is Ariadne?
Where is the Fleece?

in the long run, the world, the nations, the people, the person

Organ Tuning




Someone was tuning the organ in an empty church.
In a Gothic hall a waterfall boomed.
The voices of the tortured and schoolchildren's laughter
mixed with my vertical breath.

In an empty church someone tuned the organ
and tinkered with the pipes' wild anarchy,
demolished houses, flung thunderbolts, then built
a city, airport, highway, stadium.

If only I could see the organist!
Catch sight of his face, his eyes!
If I could trace the movements of his hands,
I might understand where he's taking us,
us and those for whom we care,
children, animals, shadows.












by Adam Zagawjewski

translated by Clare Cavanagh 

a complex relation

so many things have been said about the boston marathon bombing.  but possibly what stayed most in mind, long after the news were over, was how the suspects were identified through cameras.  hundreds of them, thousands even.  from CCTVs to handhelds.  lenses that look and watch nearly our every move.  like multiple eyes of the behemoth that is the System.  the State.  how these eyes are the eyes of the panopticon that is Michel Foucault's metaphor for the disciplinary power.

and when the armed forces moved to make their presence tangible, demonstrating the State's authoritative power directly over people's lives, stopping literally the movement of a town, of a city, we are reminded again of how complex is the relation between the individual and the State.  like separate beings.  even though at times the two may be indistinguishable from each other.

like separate beings wresting for power.
how the State flexes its muscles, showing its strength, saying:  I will hunt you down.  I will bring you down.  you must not be allowed--as no one else is allowed--to question the Order.
how the resistance boldly makes its mark.  taunting:  Oh Power!  see just how much it takes you to take down a 19-year-old boy!

through the looking-glass

photo by K. Kwe

someone read me cards.  i have always been half afraid of taking a peep into the future, like a cheat.  in the same way i try to never spoil a movie or a book or a story, even if told in midst of a conversing circle, how things will inevitably turn out in the end.  in the same way when i travel, with a luggage or a backpack, or when i run to get to know a new city, or new corners in the old city, it is always without definites in mind.  we all know astrology, sure.  and there are always the horoscopes in a page of any newspaper sold around the corner, sometimes even left on the doorstep, if not the yard.  no matter of great genius there, to connect cause with consequence, and to plot possibilities given the circumstances.  what is young will grow old, what is borne will die, and good times can turn bad, and bad, into better.  one can say it is all inevitable.  and yet.  these all do not stop us from loving and from growing children, from caring dogs, from planting perennials.  from collecting memories as if they were dimes, pennies along the pavement found in secret by little children on way to the market or the grocer, holding mommy's hand while crossing the street.  with a happy thought.  who knows, by chance, something pretty and special might just be there.  and we've got a few pennies in hand.

foretelling

at any given time a conversation can turn dark.  mention malachy.  or catastrophe.  or asteriod.  cassandra heard, and no one believed her.  but the physicists.  and they make no secret of such things.

in the meantime, everyone's children grow.  

at times in the yard, i prune.   and even though the plants know this, mornings after the mist lifts, they spring.  green.  with a bud for flowering.

mist and green, early morning