some parts anger

where do you place your anger? do you pour it in the sink? 

i find my temper short these days.

there are always 

indistinct night sounds.

must be impatience & something else.

where do you place your anger? i pour mine in a drink.

More nights ahead

We can put together a hundred or more possibilities,
letting two characters meet, in spite the number
of ways, streets, corners, bars, restaurants, cities.
Did you not once say you will have a hard drink
at the bar at the edge of your sleep? Even though cold,
I have returned to the uncertainty of outdoors now, 
stopping at diners where tired men and tired waitresses
call each other by name. The home fries both nostalgic
and sorry. Something always pulls me back. 

Sometimes I look up and watch flocks of birds, mostly
when flocks of young people pass by. Do they
know how we can devote our entire lives
to a cause truly lost?
How the foolish idealism of our once immortal
sense drove us to where we are now. Here...

And is it wrong to think women like you will always be
less lonely? I have come to deny myself. But 
how it bangs its fists on my door wanting
to be let out, telling me 
I am human, human, human. 
So I try to keep away from the door,
away from the bar at the edge of your sleep.

We must have met the same woman on the same day

An hour shy of a full day, I find the note you tacked on the wall
It has a picture of a tree where you met her, the woman sometimes
Called Fate. I reckon you noted your conversation about the same

Time I read in public, while accompanied by a painting, poem
I've written about her, and the bush, and the snake. Such happenstance
Did you ask her why she stayed where she'd go

Not for the first time I see the wall and knock at the cosmos divide: 
You, there
I, here

And our notes free on a boat bridge under moon and wind.


























          

another variation of The Story

Another Variation of The Story as Seen from
The Scene of A Poetry Reading  




the man, after having a stroke
of genius, takes his seat 
among the crowd.  his wife
beside him attempts to cover
the length of his left arm
because it had freed itself and
acquired volition.  she made it
keep still.  like a child 
who obeys only with a look.  

at last, the man is called. 
his turn to read his work
because he's been around 
the circuit long enough, and
the young writers, still
trying out the ropes, wanted
someone distinguished.  he
begins by saying how,
these days,

he's much pushed around 
on his wheelchair.  how he has 
become so courteous 
he brings his own chair on invitations.
the crowd laughs, carefully,
at his own careful joke.  he continues
saying he is forty-three and
has had many firsts
he has forgotten. 

anyway, he says, the firsts
are not important.
i'd rather the second
being in itself an affirmation
of the first.  and he carries on
long after the first hour.
the crowd understands, 
claps at cues
to later turn polite.

the wife knows.
the man doesn't.
and his freed arm
slithers off from the cover.  
and without his knowing,
moves
shuddering, slithering
closer and closer 
to the closest woman still. 




C. Carreon













 

Eve, the garden, the bush, and the snake

Before the year ends, the project will have been completed and the marsh, reclaimed.  Funny that word, "reclaimed"; as if someone had previously taken the land and turned it into watery nests.  How I would have liked to ask where did the previous inhabitants go, now that the humans have "reclaimed" the land.  The frogs, the crickets, the snakes, among others.  Around the same time last year, I found a snake close to the window, looking in.  It was light green, no thicker than my finger, and had climbed its way up the bush.  Displaced, did it want to come in?

Some nights ago, a cricket found its way in the bedroom.  I let it go. 

The snake, a man killed it with a stone and placed its body in an empty liquor bottle.  Like a prize.  He later showed it off to anyone who cared to look.

One friend, he lives alone with a tely, his father's urn, and a gecko.  He said:  one night, the gecko was nowhere to be found; and the house felt deserted.

I told him there is The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, where there is just a man like him; and a gecko living with the man.  And the gecko, in its previous life, was Jorge Luis Borges, the author my friend most admire. 

The road work for this project is nearly done.  A number of men already doing the road humps and the yellow and black stripes.  If one doesn't care to look, it is easy to mistake this place was never once a marsh.   

Instead of cutting the bush by the window, I let it grow.  And in spite of what might be better ideas, I let open all the house windows.  Sometimes, in the wee hours of early morning, I come downstairs and wonder what would I do: when I open the door and see a snake lying, waiting for me.