Flashback: March 16, 1998

                                                 in
late days                                       and
bargaining late hours                            of
                                         every ache
                                         everything
and anything
besieged by deliberate
sharp edges of burning temper
which is delinquently sore
in every respect                                 is
washed away by                          nothingness

touch

the
absolute
innocence                           lying calmly on

solipsism's ladder of words                    sank
                              vessels of perception
                                              which
is read                                      killed
in one of three
thousand ways

i don't know
which one                                   the way
                                          the arrow
                                            of time
                                                was

Thursday, October 21, 2010

she quashed this family
  without mercy
this ragtag group of people
  poisoned with sarcasm
  drunk to stupor with self-pity
with the ease of an 
  understated gesture of kindness 
  of giving a plumb
to a scared and distracted 
  little girl
  wrapped in city's crazy crowd

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

we penciled our wars in
our fears and insecurities
like a multiple choice exam
a is a rejection
melancholia is a b
bad sex is a c
and d happens to be
sins of withdrawal from
sweaty erotica
and we get to clean 
the museum of individual guilt 
that we build out of our history
our memory
if we succeed

Friday, September 24, 2010

one of the alter-egos i left in my closet
the one with regrets in its pockets
  and a few cats
is what i need now to quash 
this pulsating permanent pain behind
  the unashamed micro truths 
the dead and forgotten feast on
  with memories which don't belong to them
at strange nights when daemons 
  with bras that looked like puffy clouds 
sliced moons and courted precarious comets 
  all at the same time
why 
i don't know

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

far beyond darkness, away from our madness
our crisply folded words have been slaughtered by
the faint images of distant shores of faulty whispers

there, the lowly servants of 
   our disjointed bits of consciousness
grimace at the witnesses of the carnage
and cut down bodies with 
   a glowing delirium in their eyes

the grisly mechanics of our bodies get in the way though
while a confused metaphysics weighs down our minds
   not knowing how to ask the right questions

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

it is the dead of winter
but i am not mad
just that i know all the words
but i can not put them 
  in the right order
as the song foretold
delivering its sadness 
  with such great efficiency 

Thursday, July 8, 2010

my genealogy lies 
  deep within a language
rooted in a tangled web of 
  people, families and kinships
  lost or long dead
except in those stories 
  my mother and her mother share 
over evening tea
  listening to complaining seagulls
    on the rooftops
  looking over a vindictive sea
it's a desperate attempt
  against their corroding fragile memory
  against a vindictive time 
a designated mourner by their side 
her son and her grandson
  all wrapped in one

low flying clouds
  and an ominous sheet of rain 
are approaching fast
the flapping towels on balconies 
  hoisted much like flags
are warning against 
  a nondescript danger

conversation twists and turns
histories collide
glasses empty and fill again
  and tragedies follow:
men, fathers, grandfathers
  lost to wars, hunger and 
  other unnatural disasters
women, mothers, grandmothers 
  lost or left behind 
follow in rank
eyes fill and empty again

seagulls are eerily silent
  watching the sky for a sign
  through a thick jungle of 
  satellite dishes 
but the rain shows no sign 
  of abating

so, my genealogy lies 
  deep within a language 
  spoken by ghosts 
  of a terrible history
alive flesh and blood
  in these old women
witnessed 
  by someone who cannot
by someone whose history 
against the tide
  lies somewhere else

as darkness rolls in
rain and stories both cease
leaving their thunderous
  footsteps behind
towels retreated inside
where vacationing families
  gather over dinner and tv

seagulls received their sign
  they had been expecting
  and left
i am still here