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.

the silk road

Names are always beautiful. As beautiful 
as we can imagine them to be. Framing 
them with the lines of our wants, the unsaid 
and unanswered needs. We tell and we do not
tell; the yearnings are always difficult,

no words come, they balk at the touch.
If I may be direct, how will you respond?
If I tell you I wonder how it will be
to be right across you, the table meant
for two? It is possible.

All these exchanges happening while sharing
a metaphysical table. So it is this, we
have no bodies, no faces, no names; but
how the words flow. Moving and always
in a state of unsettled be-coming.

The silk road can be seen from outside
our window; a candle flickers, you unfold
a table napkin; I search for a word trying
to find an excuse to look at you.
Someone comes close, asks what we'll have
for dinner. 

light

The conversation tonight was about light. How temporal it is. Like body, like breath. Like how two people meet. Living, and then, also, leaving. Both. Always happening at the same time. This mad provision 

we call here, now, what exists, merely passing in time & space, brushing, lingering, lingered, in transit, a longing, through the vastness this presence, phenomenon, is-ness, then gone, to where? from where? extending, to nowhere, elsewhere, liminal, between, nuance, distance, distances, horizon, eternal.
The commonest road has no name. It is a road that is not a road. It is light. That stretches. A beam, a bridge, crossing, reaching us at the selvedges, where we are on the folds of happenstance, wrinkle in space, in time, breathing each other, are you there? am i there? here i am. here you are.

wsw 18 mph

There are movies about this.
And books, and love affairs
and stories.
How there is a wall, call it
wind, geography, distance

upon which we press our ears
and listen to the other.
Words and breaths.
We place our palms flat
on the wall and listen to

the wind howl, the gusts
shaking the leafless treetops
and making the windows sound

as though knocking, to open.
But we do not. Knowing why
it is better, not.

waking up with no memory

It is the entanglements after. If there are any.
Most of the time, it is best

when both know it is nothing else. But that
spur of the moment--

muscles, adrenaline, the quickening of beats
towards cosmic release

before returning to the exhaustion of bodies 
and what is it that has always been there: our

own tired places in a slow and spinning world. 
It has been a long, long time

since.
Never quite losing sobriety facing passion.

Always steady to take the long drives 
and decide at least three steps ahead, as though

still playing chess with whoever it is across.
On better days,

I think myself in transit on a lucid boat
crossing an ocean called Weather&Time.

There has got to be a return or an arrival
somehow, although at the moment

my thoughts are only as simple 
as has she thought of me today.

what a wo/man does

What a woman does, it seems, is keep   But who am I to talk about woman?
all windows and doors, holes, slits,   When there is truly no difference.
fissures and cracks, gaps, spaces,     No lines of be-ing. 

open. That is no sin.                  Isn't everyone not and is     
The sense of whole-ness.               The same?

A continuous flow of wind & water,
fire and memory. There is no sin.      An endless lecture on construction,
Only a means to control people, his-   Suspicion and disbelief...

story, ideology...                     Also, indefatigable hope
I have stopped believing               In all its sarcasm and irony.

six hundred lifetimes ago. Not enough  
knows how we receive distorted forms   I am tempted to ask her
after translations: Freud's            Straightforward.

"die Seele" which meant "the soul"     But here, now, much caution
became "mind" in the pages rendered    Almost not unlike young again.

into what seems an undying treatise.
It is difficult to trust               Is it her rejection?
the nuances after a long time.         There is truly no difference.














                                     
                   

what the mind says

what the minds says/ is altogether different.

i take walks in the morning, walks

in the late afternoon towards evening, evening late

the lights becoming/ is altogether different.

i have to keep remembering now, nearly

all the time what made the decision to keep on 

this way beyond distances and times of day, past

the roads seen ahead/ what the mind says

is altogether different.

After, Then

There will be no return, woman. 
No knock on your door, my once beloved.
We both are too weary to attempt 
Any more old familiar dance.
Any better man knows, there really is
No more having back what was lost.
What was lost impossibly scattered now.
Irretrievable. Irredeemable.
All that we have left, you and I
Are the remains. Only another form
Of ashes. Arms wrapped around yourself
Standing by the closed front door. 
I, looking back at you, at the porch, 
The yard, the house, the neighborhood, 
The curb, the life,
From the rearview mirror.

half a world away

My friend says You're back.

Over unlimited nationwide call
We talked politics for hours.
He impassioned, myself spectator
Just returned. Two days later
I received his wedding invitation.

My friend asks Will you make it?

I do not tell I do not want to go.
Maybe the mind will change itself
And give my childhood friend
Our being at the same place again.
When I fly to see him

And the person we both knew
From high school I did not expect
He will marry twice,
Something inevitably will change.
I will feel ever more

The gray hair and the distance
Of what was, has been, will be.

woman with the sun behind her

How could your photos be so
beautiful your life
an entire summer

There must be no worries
they do not exist
they touch you not

There you are at play with
dog at the shore
one sunset

Your laughter and your memory
of it as well as my envy
will last very very long

a matter of time

And does he tell you he will return?
In what words, scattered like rain or
Clumped together like flowers in bouquet,
Predictable as the swinging of a boy
Just small enough for the set, too old
The year after this next. In what words

Does he tell you he will return?

I move through water filled with pansies
And daylight that spills into the night,
People without colour in a language
Familiar yet strange; how do I tell her

I will return?

She waves her hand, says name no month.
There is a garden beside her, constant 
Sunshine above, occasional rains, 
Eternal stars. The dogs lay close to her.
I dream.
Watching the night here remain light.

(where it is foggiest) a long goodbye 6

Easy to say this place the foggiest so far--but I will not
Succumb to hyperbole. Although not all the time, 
I measure words well--as much as possible
Neither too much or less, it matters. Although the golden rule
More often does not happen. Cannot be humanly applied.
Here we are anyway--playing

The trying-hard little hand of god over lives that matter 
Only as far as the thread of empathy goes, stretched little farther
By pity. Like the stray dog outside the gate

I feed but do not take in. Room in the heart does not translate
Well in actual logistics. (But I am angry writing this
The id wrestled down, one against two.) I count

Weeks in one hand: my one special dog, old now, I cannot bring.
The rest, I think with a lawyer, I can leave more easily...

(thursday night) a long goodbye 5

For whom is the goodbye? I ask myself now
Finally understanding why they all ask

My consistent refusal for despedida
No send-offs, I said, No one is leaving.

Even so I think of returns.
Knowing all these are leaving me

As I leave them. 
I do not want to sleep, wanting only

To keep awake. Lengthen, possibly, time.
This Thursday night longer and longer still.

There is a date waiting for me. A door.
An airplane. 

(no essays) a long goodbye 4

In time, I will give in, finally
Into the overwhelming lake of words
Into the river of words flowing
Into sea, and eventually
Into the ocean of forgetfulness.

The reader (the world) (you) becomes 
Finally my faceless intimate friend
Sitting beside me on the cliff
Overlooking mists of distance,
Pasts, dreams, futures... our feet

Dangling on the edge and the sky
Forever with a silver still sun.
And I will tell in the way my father
Once told of his childhood stories,
My own childhood, misty with disuse

And untelling, kept too long in a room
Within a room, within a room barred
By hardwood door, by steel door, 
By brick wall meant as much to conceal
As to say, "Move on. It is done here."

Beside the wall, sometimes a table.
On the table, flowers from the yard.
By the flowers, tea.
Sometimes, beside the wall, a bed.
I knock on the wall. And sometimes

Tell a memory in that exact way
Telling fails to tell all the details:
Exact hue of the afternoon, exact
Feeling of the felt at the bottom
Of a chess piece I was playing,

Learning consequences and consequences
Long before a single move is made.
How did my own father failed to see?
He taught me the game. "Pensar. 
Pensar." Can a child see futures

When a decision is made? I inherited
Many things from my father, I'm afraid.
Including the older face on the mirror.
The same face my lovers see 
At night, in the morning, when I think

I am alone, placing palms on the wall 
Holding the flood of words into 
Becoming few and fewer still.  

A long goodbye

I have few weeks left before final leave-taking.
These weeks pass in slow motion but pass they do 
Just the same. The list of things to do has 
A certainty in it: the number of banks, the emails, 

The visits to dentist, and barber whom I will see 
Twice more before having to find someone like him
Again in another country (though I doubt it

Someone who already knows, by seeing me, 
Exactly what to do). A poem has been written about 
Having the same barber throughout one's life, 

A kind of faithfulness and understanding of being.
I anticipate on the last visit the appearance 
Shall be the same though I tell him 

To cut as short as possible and he might wonder 
But not ask. The scissors and blade will move
In the same way. The look on the mirror 

And the sound of "thanks", the tip before the door 
The same. Of the list, only the dentist will know 
From the way a tooth submits to certainties.

Disenchantment

Is perhaps what happens
time and again until 

believing and loving
becomes hard work.

It must begin sooner 
than later in others

more frequently and less
to some, possibly why

it cannot be helped: being
lonely whether one knows it

or not; there are always
alternative companions:

a book, a dog, a date
and sometimes, shadows.

And what about at the sacristy

Grandmother, when I was so much younger, brought me
To the sacristy. It was my birthday. A man was there.
He was wearing a gown, wearing a smile, and smelled
Of something else. I was supposed to ask for blessing
Only he was able to give, or so said Grandmother.
This was another lifetime ago, of course, although

I still do remember the door. And the wall. The shape
Of what was dark and deeply engraved on sides of pews.
Grandmother smelling of talc and old lipstick,
The old man with his voice thick as torso.
The noviciate I whispered with one night of songs
Who stepped back into the shadows in fear when told.

The bible has long been unread. The child on afternoons
Reading verses long gone. Still, these days I continue 
To refer what it is: poetry: the word turning flesh.
The old man who was called Father was a stranger.
Grandmother has stories I will never come to know.
I heard a bell outside the sacristy

And with the door I had come into behind me, the man
Turned his back towards a blind corner in the room
And disappeared. There is always another door.

Some days there is the heat

undeniable, seeping its way
into skin and deeper still
through the eyes to be 

itself: a drum throbbing 
in the middle of temples
and behind brows

making everything else too
bright, too humid, too
loud--the temper too short.

Some nights there is the heat
undeniable, seeping its way
past reason and deeper still

into body that throbs into
becoming an animal heaving
groping, finding a latch

in the darkness for release.

a very long wait

I think it is not fear of death itself as much as
Fear of dying; death is a given, the psyche
Attuned to it since time beyond memory: all 

Archetypes of travel (companions, fellow solo
sojourners, boats, terminals, stop-overs...) 
Everyday, departures are what have come to be 

known like the pace of one's own breathing--
But who can tell of true arrivals?
Everyone has ideas, some more convincing

Than others; what may be more fearful is 
Living: that very long wait, so long 
We become desperate lovers of life itself.














  

2300

Twenty three hundred and there is a random line in mind.
An image lingered from the last story read, an Atwood;
the story, party autobiographical.
At the corner of my eye, a house lizard looks about.
You can almost see through its new skin.
There are no stars tonight; the sky is threatening rain.
I want to tell you about stray dogs daily seen
but it not going to be a happy story.
What can be told happily about? Happily being a word
that skips and hops like a child
singing a newly learned song or meeting a new friend
who has agreed to exchange marbles with a bubble gum
the kind that leaves a tint on your teeth.
When did you learn to whistle?
I learned to move my ears when I was nine or ten or
eleven or twelve; who can remember exactly when?
Summers melt themselves together; you and I once
ran light footed on the wind itself.
The ears can still move to this day;
a trick to fascinate any child with.
One of these days I think I will find myself
telling why I have stayed away from church
even though god must still be out there.
No one asked "Can a poem really change a world?" Answer is
no
but they are written anyway because the lines are there.
Lines like boundaries of what lies on either sides.
The day is unfinished, but has ended.