be careful of adventures

Be careful of adventures. The point is 
not always the going but the be-coming 
something else, familiar and not. 
The change, something that will happen, 
that has happened, within. We will not

be ever the same again, as the river
is crossed, as the day has ended.
As we have entered the wilderness
of love or of loneliness--the being
that was once our old selves suddenly

turning to be so much younger, so much 
a believer than we have finally become
here on the other side. 

sitting on the steps, leaving on a bike, at 10

There is a plausible reason why
women (may) tend to believe it is
they who are rejected.
The apparatuses of ideologies
repeatedly soak them so.
But long ago, before all these

we were ten and I said something
that had hurt you and I was sorry
and you wouldn't accept it,
refusing the popsicle offering
already starting to melt in my hand.
Sitting on the steps that summer

I learned who will always be
fearful; and suddenly fearful 
of my own discovery, I 

threw away the offering in anger.
The popsicle's sweetness 
melting away, its bone to the sun.

Was it my first desperation then?
The first grand show 
to the largest audience of one

whose magnificence I discovered
and feared. And she?
She wouldn't even look at me.

So at ten, I took my bike and
learned to leave in pompous glory.

a dark impenetrable forest

It is raining now where I am. 
The heater hums, the gray will not leave
until the weeks of winter will finally
exhaust themselves. In the meantime

the tea, the sound of rain, the days
in the calendar filling up
like things to do that march on and on.
I sense my right eye stooping now
like an old working dog. It means
the glasses will have to be changed.

In the meantime, how to talk about
translation? When everything 
we manifest are truly incomplete.
A student, armed with practice and theory, 
argues: translation is always a gain.
In time

one will know gentleness; and why 
the horizon is what it is: something
perceivable, what we can move towards
eternally, as we would a dream, 
as we would each breath. Always beyond. 

There are many ways to live.
Even the one who ruminates drinks tea,
the bag possibly packed in a factory 
filled with underpaid men and women,
children too, in some developing country 
never far beyond.

All in an open circle.
Echos-monde.
The water from this rain.
Me. You. What the limitations I have
make of You other than the You
that you actually live. What we imagine
of ourselves, of each other. 
To one another.

In the meantime, I write a letter
to a You.
Letter without postal stamp, physical 
address, even a legible name. As though
believing the tangible is an organic case 
always subject to decay, unable to contain
what we are truly trying to reach.

trace

More likely than not, the Japanese
got it right. About the traces
in our lives--our very long lives, 
perhaps, very long till our souls 
grow very tired and very old.
                             And 
more likely, Buddha, as well,
got it right. About the traces
in our lives--our very long lives,
perhaps, very long till our souls
grow very tired and very old.
                            

archive

Three nights ago, exactly, I dreamed 
the woman from five years ago 
whom I've lost to Germany, married 

to a man my jealousy--
    how it shames me to myself 
    that one word over which anger 
    appears more dignified or honorable--

could easily stain undesirable,
something I nonetheless do not do.
Knowing it is my own ego

at fault and not the man himself 
who, on an even keel, I hope would
love her more than she does herself,

which is really another way of saying
more than I had, could.
Three nights ago, exactly, I dreamed

her, with a face I have never ever seen
before but still easily recognized
in the way of those eyes, those cheekbones,

those lips, and arms, and the very is-ness
of her. In the dream, she has grown
more toned, stronger in the way I have

no knowing whether it is out of brokenness
or something finally better. Knowing only
how it was so long ago since 

her dancing was a way to
punish her own body, wring out and into it 
the pain of her psyche:

The weight of words, she called it.
One day, she said, you'll never 
see me again... Three nights ago, exactly,

I saw her again in the dream:
the toned muscles, the scent of her,
"air ballet" I thought,

all that cloth, and all that wringing,
lifting as though made light
the weight of being.

Was she happy? I could not ask
in the dream, our faces were so close.
We could kiss, were about to, would

kiss I do not remember upon waking.
Only the recurring sense, as always,
that I had a chance and I chose

to lose it.

(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. 

a long goodbye 3

Dear Friend, I fancy meeting you in a very crowded street in an intersection of peoples when the red light turns green and everyone including ourselves rush forward to our own elsewheres. 

The preciseness of things will allow us not to see each other unlike the way one morning on a particular June day I met again at once four people in a corner paces away from ---. 

One I was with about two years in my early twenties with no love lost between us at parting. One met in the late twenties leg of whitewashed paintings. Another through her large scales paintings of cats and flowers. The fourth mere hours from an airport. 

What are the chances we meet again? Together in a spot as if rehearsed sometime somewhere. If at ten dreaming in California someone tells us we will commit suicide at 26 and have PhD at 36 and then be half way around the world bearing a kind of slowness of

Being, that there will be sunshine and sea and we will wonder if this is still life or dream. Why should we not fancy multiverses where in another life some things did not happen and all these merely a child's wondering. A child still must be dreaming elsewhere 

On a bed with starships taped on the ceiling and midmorning flooding in a roomful of books. Or must it be a dog, one of the hundreds of strays in a Catholic country with least love for the least. I fancy hectares of land where dogs run and not only dream. When I move 

From one place to another and meet people and memorise faces in spite myself I fancy meeting them again in another life. One where hurriedly passing the crisscrossing pedestrian lines we are less estranged from ourselves.

a long goodbye 2

Are we not merely a passing?
A mere body of memory
That dissolves inevitably
Into traces? Even the earth 
That keeps us in its bosom

Means to erase us, compost
Of nothing significantly
Important, if only for a moment
There in that briefest
Brief encounter: soul meeting

In timid attempt at love,
Immortality, that kind of song
Praising our own slow passing.
We have given it a name:

Life. Love. Living. Song.
Poetry. Your name. Mine.
Others we know of. All of us
Mere passing, remembering
Each other in hopes of staying.

Room

Consider a room with two doors
One facing east the other west
Both meeting at the same 

Room where one meets another
Where there is no Other
Where the floor between is

A border that is not---
A space undefined
A place familiar

Rodovia

Portia passed away yesterday. Word reached me late, 
translating itself from Portuguese to English, 
from the last photo I saw of her (Atlanta, smiling 
beside another colleague on sabbatical leave)
to the photo found after having made my way across

morning coffee, rain (another storm is coming
to these islands), and jazz.
On the news, only a broken motorcycle on highway
only a trace, previous presence. No Portia.

Had I been at the office yesterday I would have had
company to share loss with: this kind 
of irreplaceable space occupied by her joy.
Her youthfulness at 67.

She would have had a temper for mentioning the number--
the only way to cause her age. But such a life! 
Of indefatigable joy.

My Father's Birthday

My father's birthday yesterday, I remember but chose not to
Say anything, choosing to remember why not. 
The backstory is long, kept away in a partially closed room

Not far from where most people stay to admire the garden
Among others. Stoicism is plenty, so is civility.
Keeping surface clear, spotless from hostility as a glass table. 

My mother expected me to call. I am always never 
Too far from anything I chose. She must be upset now
Not replying to my message left like an after thought

Pretending forgetfulness. Of course, she knows and chose
Not to remember. My poor brave mother whose dreams 
Must have been as bright as she before bearing a child

So similar in many ways to the father who, too, must have been
As bright as any bright and dreaming young man before 
He succumbed to secret darknesses.

this, now, only

The marvel of seeing you

always the first time 

every moment, knowing

we will never again pass

this same way 

as the same persons again.

exes and whys

The programmer I am working with now
knows the landscape and language
I only have the vaguest idea about.
Her algorithmic words she translates
meeting on a plane with my verse 
in an art collaboration we call mad.
On her 13-inch MacAir, 
black on violet Queer. I wonder about
the prompt for such declaration or
the necessity for staking such name.
Or any name for that matter, names
being able and unable to define
at the same time. I understand and not
many familiar names people call
themselves to make more human.
An agender, for instance, refuses any
line, that mark, which maps shapes,
forms, volume, movement, spaces.
The project we are working on
brings abstract spaces into a real.
Something one can hold onto,
participate in. How so many things
I do not fully understand, except,
as the collaboration's theme goes,
we are all children of Eve.

clay

What the clay tells is simple: what is broken from care-less remains broken. 
No amount of shaping, no fire can prepare it for fall. Such things as trust,
Maybe not love.
Or maybe that is why I am wrong. Small heart that I have with not enough 
Room to let in anyone that had, once, been let out. Closed the door.

wonderer

The existential questions do not end. 
I began asking when I was twelve
would I be the same, I asked mum, 

were my name different, 
had I liked things different.
It was summer on way to gran's;
my favourite shirt on: Sydney
because it fit perfect, was light

blue green embossed sea and sky.
And there was hibiscus blooming
the walkway to gran's; when I looked
up the sky was sea the clearest hue.

And I understood that
maybe it didn't matter at all.   




photo J.Yap

Anger

is something i have 
in bursts i try to understand
where it is coming from
some remote place
insisting to remain
unnamed---
is something turned
from inside out---
roger does muay thai
to reciprocate 
violence into the cosmos
a channeling out
of fury
a welcoming of pain
we had a good laugh
about his broken heart
how his body wants
to be broken in turn---
three months he says
honeymoon stage i say---
who has the capacity
to take in 
my negative when it hurls
itself dark and unforgiving
angry

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.


























          

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.

taking a world on the shoulder

What we had was time and an excess of courage.
Immortals dreaming of endlessness
What to do with the beyond imaginable: True
Love and sunsets of halfway around the world.
Was it as clear as your toes underwater
Crystal sea on a blue tropical Sunday? What
To be.  How.
A little child squeals, the mother surprises with
Delights: look an ant on sand carrying a world on its shoulder
Look the endless tireless march to the beyond
All of them certain of tomorrow and afraid.
What happened between the dreaming and the coming
True?  Incremental losses
Of time and faith and courage: all necessary
All inevitable.
So that the mother looks at the child now and remembers
feeling the known unnameable.
     

sometimes bolder

after a number of drinks
and right before
a single bed

a conversation with
half-meant debate
about the matter

of it all: art
and change
to what

extents

can men go on 
and on ignoring
libido 

loneliness
and the liveable
change