inside the ribcage

Here, at this time of the year, the sky flatten 
the hours. It becomes almost impossible to tell,
sometimes, the time unless you press your pulse

to know you are still among the living. Here,
where every thing has become so efficient and
then not. The selvedges are ripped, if one cares

to notice. Such small things like the seeing
through an opened window the lovers, now kissing,
have forgotten to close. Most of the time

every one has learned to move with flat-line
hearts that have become so civil, so tirelessly
euphemistic that at times I am beginning to feel

this calamity, incredibly scripted, un-human.

(ants in this world) a long goodbye 9

I can count now on one hand
The number of days left on this little island
Of sweets. Days the colour of turmeric.
(It rains just now, wet monsoon has come)

This is a place of hope, no matter
What its people say. More than half its year
The bamboo chimes hanging on my front door
Sounds of water. The shore half hour away.

When the breeze blows on your beloved's hair
And when you see grown men and women
Come out at downpour, play with their children,
You will know why 

Tired white men find their way here
To rest at last from the world at large.
But I leave. By the cosmos' grace, I leave.
(An ant's work what we do. So little
         
To add to so much more.)
And two days before I leave, I shall ferry
Visit a spider woman in these islands, 
Who wrote poetry of memory, being, becoming

It shall be a moment in her herbs garden
Where there will be no promise
Only a doing by understanding
This so much work, this so much work

More than an entire ant's life can do. 

(ants in this world) a long goodbye 9

I can count now on one hand
The number of days left on this little island
Of sweets. Days the colour of turmeric.
(It rains just now, wet monsoon has come)

This is a place of hope, no matter
What its people say. More than half its year
The bamboo chimes hanging on my front door
Sounds of water. The shore half hour away.

When the breeze blows on your beloved's hair
And when you see grown men and women
Come out at downpour, play with their children,
You will know why 

Tired white men find their way here
To rest at last from the world at large.
But I leave. With the cosmos' grace, I leave.
(An ant's work what we do. So little
         
To add to so much more.)
And two days before I leave, I shall ferry
Visit a spider woman in these islands, 
Who wrote poetry of memory, being, becoming

It shall be a moment in her herbs garden
Where there will be no promise
Only a doing by understanding
This so much work, this so much work

More than an entire ant's life can do. 

welfare of the world

Had I still been younger, I would have
still wanted to change the world.
Time has a way of showing a little
at a time, moment to moment 
letting me scale what can be done, 
what can't.

I write quiet poems now. Burning still,
I'd like to believe, in an almost imploding
kind of way; far from what I once had been:
immortal in being 

so much younger. wide eyed
out in the streets.

It has been years. 
And I have come to understand the way
the body, too, comes to understand:
how some stories are longer than we are.

Like violence.
Kindness.
Unconditional.

Some moments I wonder if a poem 
does make a difference in the world.
The kind that is enough to move a shadow.
Or are we deluding ourselves
believing we worth as much as a star.

It is possible
we don't. We are 
alive anyway.

Like every other little thing everyday:
leaf still on a twig, blade of grass,
weed, ant, housefly, guinea pig, 
farmed chicken, stray dog.

Who gets to say which life matters more.

Some stories, by their nature, are
truly longer than we are...
No one can really save the world and live 
to tell all the stories beginning to end.

world moving

1
When we lie down seeing the sky, 
we may as well be standing 
from another angle; the sky is sea foam.
Such ways the world can be

seen, different eyes: punto de vista.

2
The call, sooner than expected, arrived
yesterday; half the request granted.
What it meant we knew from the beginning.
In the beginning, we knew 

different and the same: punto de vista.

sezon deszczowy

I bought cigarettes at a corner store because 
it was late because I wanted to wait awhile longer 
till (maybe) she'll come around because her messages 
had said situations because her new lover left 
and her old meddled and her father half a world away
are simultaneously happening into a bad place 

because in nearly seven years since we met at Gerry's 
she had not talked about bad places except very briefly 
and in passing the time her mother passed on 
and she did not return home and I did not ask because 
she did not tell why because once she said who wants to 

listen about bad places because people care about funny 
and she had worked herself funny because she did
not want to tell about lonely because it was clear because 
it need not need any telling because it was bright as day 
the alcohol and the series of lovers because she insisted

staying in this country because when i asked why there was 
no clear answer because something was lost or someone was 
because she was slurring when she called 
describing how to move the night because she was still 
in transit but wanted drinks because I've taken rain checks 

because our hours rarely meet because she comes when 
she comes and who else was. 
I sent her a message saying I was

coming over because there was really no need for her to bother 
bringing the buckwheat and the wines to my place when I could 
because it was always easier for me to leave than for me to ask 
her to because hours could get so late like the time it was already
morning and my head had become a blast because she comes 

when she comes because I wanted none of it because we've known 
each other seven years now because it had always been good 
distance because there were bad places that need not telling 
because they were bright and clear because it was always

in keeping of spaces she remained quiet while I waited 
outside her door this rainy evening in this rain-est season of the year 
because it was (always) proper to wait for a woman's invitation 
to be let in because no matter the bad places described by phone 
into an invitation to share a certain loss because her door

never opened after knocking and five cigarettes one after another 
because the weathermen predicted rain because she did not stay 
sober enough for an umbrella, story, or train.

Roethke

She says to hurry to hurry to hurry I say to pause "I take my waking slow"
The things to do will never run out They are a legion that never slows
She chides and she smiles and sometimes understands the need to slow
In praise of slowness we kiss She half walks and I half run
To take our waking slow

on mothers on Mothers' Day

Because I will never be a mother, 
I can never bear
the true weight of the world. 

exiles

That one has to drive two hours from the City of Angels to see stars
we all laugh about it, it being close to impossible where we are now
seated in the middle of an island still to be overtaken by what has
already covered cities of our past lives, stardust, blankets, bog
no one really wants to talk plain about in words brave enough not to balk
from one's own forgiving the things underneath, unspoken, hidden.  
A circle of us who ran away, who got away, are sorry to have left but are
not coming back, are lost but not asking, are abandoning, are making.
Here, no need to drive anywhere to or walk away from but the moving
is constant anyway, from shadows real or of our own making.

a lesser man

I.
the first time i met d* i almost run out of wind, that kind
when you are caught between exhaling and inhaling
so strong the point of shock.  i thought i saw my mother.

a most curious case and i had to remind myself
i was seeing another.  even though there really
was less mistaking in that smile.  
also, those eyes.  the oval face.

of course, mother is older.  with more wear.  a difference
in contexts and years.  although i could not help thinking
seeing d* i am seeing my mother in times much happier.

a lucky man who won her.  although 
i could not say the same for her.


II.
one of my fears is becoming my father.  i look 
at the mirror and see more and more his face.  
some day i am going to write the whole of it.
but not now.  not yet.


III.
there are a moments of most clarity.  
when i see her and wonder
what she sees in this man--
raised to be stubborn, built as 
less.  who meets her halfway 
only under light of day.

what does it take to be a woman.
a man will never know.
he who is always
lesser beside her.

a dinner

He says their language had a name for the storm surge
what has been forgotten by the language's own people

the name was kept in a vault that was kept in the marrows
between tongue and memory.

This, of course, was no surprise to every one 
seated around the table, the man to his right

had spoken on ethno-epic only an hour ago.
Every one agrees 

on memory keeping and cultural work and sense 
of identity;  the woman among them says "yam"

the night's metaphor on roots 
of self, bearing from the underground.

Of the five, two are most uncompromising; 
two, being won over

one sits noncommittal in the background.

On working for making a better world

at the end of the day, dark after work, i lay my self exhausted and burned from working on love.  wondering if knowing that passion burns is any help at all.  in the morning, the questions flee from the bright light.  and i burn for love again.

the displaced

it is difficult to love this country, i thought many times, one afternoon walking through the heat of molten air.  but the people are always warm, no matter the odds and flaws.  and that is why, maybe, not far away a foreigner has decided to stay.  carrying his toddler child, he points at a very clear blue sky and a bird and speaks his German, his child happy with him.  an other world fitting itself in.

cape town

if you come to visit a city, do so not as a tourist.  
else there will be many things you will miss.  

the tourist is always asked to see
the many beautiful things,  

of course he is also asked to see
the beautiful only.

there is a street

i ask her to read a piece of the new work, the work about a city, re-imagined, not appearing the way it is, appearing translucent, unreal.  she is a local, in many ways, i am not.  i think i see the city only now, even though, have seen it many times in dreams, in re-imaginings.  there are many things i have missed, many things not known.  she used to take me to the streets and show the alleys, the secret corners of Chinese men and herb women, among others.  streets for textiles only, streets for glass, streets for cutflowers, streets for these, and streets for that.  streets for motor bolts, for rubber slippers, for half starving children, for pet fish, for castoff rags, for fiber ropes, for stolen goods, for dogs, for women, for fruits, including the seasonal.  also including the dark and darker stories i can only imagine under the naked bright noon.  she had spent fragments of childhood in these streets, their eccentricities.  i had spent hours with her, held by hand lest i get lost.  the streets, the entire city, always a novelty.  i ask her to read a piece of the new work, the work about a city, re-imagined, not appearing the way it is, appearing translucent.  this is unreal, she says on the piece about the infamous red light street.  i ask why: is it because you want realism?  she cannot make up her mind. 

half a morning

away from the calendar, it is easier to pretend an endlessness.  an easy-ness of being.  this morning, i cut the flowers growing from the basil.  the flowers were beautiful, but the basil will die if they are let be.  i talk to the dogs who have the gift of contentment.  they are lucky.  yesterday, there were strays at the streets and i thought, someday i shall be a fosterer.  not now, not yet, when still preoccupied with the many things that speed time.  who ever said life is a race, and we are all racehorses?

at the conference, someone cried semi-feudalism and nearly raised a fist.  it started with the talk of horse-rig system.  an old way that lingered, half-dead, into the present.  and the word she cried so confrontational.  the large room was quiet.  no one said a word.  not everybody agreed.  i thought, why worry about men?  worry about the horse.  who cannot say a word.  who cannot have a god.

this country has a history of gods.  It is standing on a huge island of a God.  everyone prays.  too many claims.

Jayvee asked me to write something to close his exhibit on transcendence.  a one-man show of 3x4 paintings of acrylic and mixed media.  layerings of washes and drips, transparency in monochromatic whites, blues, grays.  non-figurative sense of the form.  i finished this morning, while the sky is in September downcast.  the news earlier was urgent about war and a mass burial.  i also wrote Jayvee a poem.  not one of us mentioned a god.













  

on essentialism and selves

possibly not the same person who takes the foil and the épée and point at another's chest to kill.  for sport.  a physical version of another involving the killing of hundreds and millions in several stages until one's own pawn becomes greater than another's king.  plans for war.  kill time while sharping the mind.  possibly 

not the same person who tends the basil, the tarragon, the wild mint, the parsley, the dill.  who takes time to watch the sunrise glow and dreams of sea.  not 

the same person, angry and a vise, who throws without regret, lines, lives.  not the same one who collects.  memories and serenity, joys in souvenirs.  the one who sings with a guitar and writes

the world as it is as is, and life as is, it is. 

copenhagen

Copenhagen is not a real city, he says, reviewing the number of murders and theft, the number of people that is less 

than the population of stricken children in the humid city where we were 
eating eggs benedict in a place that smelled of vanilla.  A waiter named Denmark 

came to pour water.  The name on the tag on the crisp white shirt.  Only in this country, he adds, noticing the name.  I only thought what a happenstance--having known 

such penchant for first names:  a Xhemei, an Angus, a Lucy Pearl, a Lefer, a Lady Goddess,  
a Lady Macbeth, a Sir Lord, a Phil.Mighty, a Douglas McArthur, an Avril Lavigne.

Copenhagen is not a real city, he says again, pointing at more cities and stopping, perhaps
not without a touch, the cities in his Italy.  The man missing his home.

to make sense of the world,

some resort to words and the trouble (and pains) of definitions: this is
what is, and therefore, that is not.  in other words, this is

the drawing of lines.  the making of differences,  the pointing
of marked territories, otherwise known as concepts.  

or boundaries.  whichever is deemed closest  to or farthest from
the perceived real ("real", of course, being a construct

which no one says, unless...)  Simone says
"One is not born---

but becomes one" which sums the efforts of many who trouble 
(and pain) with definitions:  what we think we know

we may not really know.






*the full text by Simone de Beauvoir is "One is not born a woman, but becomes one."


















 
  

traveling short distances

1. it is thursday.  after having made a few arrangements, there is a four-hour breath before another plunge.  this is it, now, and i take it, even though i am unable to stop glancing at the clock, not knowing exactly whether it is out of apprehension or anticipation. 

2. after yet another meeting last night which thankfully did not extend 'til past eight, had a brief exchange with Greg who is not of this city and who is always a pleasure to talk with, mainly because the exchange, in another language and of ontological topics, is reminiscent of things.  last night, the brief conversation included the subject of philosophy being categorized in the social sciences vis a vie being categorized in the letters; also the idea of line as an illusion to which he answered phenomenology.  i do not know if it is his former monastic life and the considerable theology studies i've had, or the circles of people in the country of another time, space, place, and language that we both happen to know, or both of these somehow meet.   we do not talk about details of previous or current lives; these are irrelevant.

3. she looked extra pretty last night when i arrived and told her so.  you don't look exhausted at all at work, i joked and she laughed.  she had arrived earlier and had time to make dinner. i did the dishes and walked with the dogs.  stayed up 'til almost midnight doing paperwork.

4. read a poem before bed.  even in poetry, the sad, difficult world is always of beauty.