Andromeda

Subtlety

2010-09-17T12:53:00.000-07:00

The sunset spilling all over your window was a peach turning orange, with plums and grapes bursting into clouds.

I thought to myself, the landscape had more imagination than I.

Wet on wet I was told of this technique. Watercolors and brushes steeped into too much water ran swiftly across the page, leaving colors to chase one another. Hues falling into different hues, gaining the subtlety of clouds.

Alas, I could never paint clouds.

Points of the Sun

2009-07-25T07:04:00.000-07:00

I am scrambling to hold you.
For suddenly, my heart became a flat landscape where lights hold nothing but an empty sky.

I am drowning in the nakedness of this space.
I am acutely more aware that it is only I that decorate this place,
and my breathing the only sound carried off to a short infinity.

How do I move?
How can this stillness bind me immobile?
What sand and stone do I fear will be disturbed once I conquer an inch?

This is the prayer my mind speaks,
let nothing change for I may go this way again,
finding the direction towards where my heart orignally met you.

thread of fear

2009-04-23T01:45:00.000-07:00

under what rock
beneath what burrow
do we lie and deny ourselves of being found?

even as open bodies
we are sheltered by the shadows of the sun
soft-bodied crabs treading
under birds of prey

and as we are lifted by our toes
our imaginations retreat to the same doubts
where it emerged
of being lost once more

Nimble

2009-01-19T23:27:00.000-08:00

How can your love define me?
Your fingers trace atlases on my body
and suddenly, I rediscover what was once lost.
The lines your fingers draw
contour new frontiers, clear wider spaces, and carve open heaving floodgates
where rivers emerge and babbling brooks find and follow their own trails.

I am breathing through every open pore.

The sun rises in all directions.
And the mist falling on this landscape
drives the green grass to break through
the fiber of my earth
and stand glistening under the light
bending with the wind,
thriving on every terrain
of desert and ice.

A Letter for No One

2008-12-21T19:22:00.000-08:00

I don’t want to like you too much, because my mind plays tricks on me. Thinking of you makes me feel less lonesome and lonely at the same time. It’s a double-edged dagger biting into my hand and heart.

So yes, it is odd.

It is odd – the way I wear you in my pocket, on my sleeves, around my neck – because thinking of you makes it okay to ride longer bus rides and stand waiting for trains on platforms on afternoons when the crowd is thick and people mill around with their own worries, while my head is filled with traffics of you. It aches to think how fine your arm hair may look like, how you may smell on mornings, and how my head may rest on your shoulder and feel as though it belongs there, on a solid, concave spot without exactly knowing.

And then it breaks just a little, the lord of the dance stepping on my scattered desires of you, laughing as crackling coals on fires do, with sharp, snapping notes of twigs consumed in flames.

For there are no road signs, and I stand as a delayed passenger with a map but without directions. Your absence and silence speaks a million miles between you and me ever meeting round that bend, while I still hold unto my luggage, not knowing when to drop it.

Tepid

2008-11-22T06:21:00.000-08:00

What we fear is not the distance, nor the stretch of hours between the night and the daybreak.
It is the measure of warmth that is etched on our skins when the graze of the hand becomes tepid to the touch and the kiss deadens into a cooler climate. It is when the body loses friction and the edges of our fingers and minds dull. Something else slips in between, muffling words and mellowing embraces, without so much as flicking a spark between you and me and the letters we string up to move us.

In Retreat, I Find You

2008-11-22T06:15:00.000-08:00

I think of you when the room fades into the background and the present noises reduce to mumbles – you appear more clearly; the outline of your mouth wrinkling into a smile floats as feathers do on water, and lingers there, on the surface, with its small ripples moving outwards, echoing from my spine, to my knees, and heels; and in those idle seconds, I find you, I capture you, in a most detailed memory my heart can carve out of your face.

Throes

2008-02-12T02:17:00.000-08:00

how does taste grow stale in one's mouth?
how does a scent lose its power?
how does one forcefully forget?
for i have memories of you that keep walking all over me
even when i am asleep
even when i am lost in a dizzying disarray
and the stars are no longer in their constellations
i remember you and you on my lips

and i find you, among all things, in streets we walked
but could not remember,
i see you, in strangers who have your eyes, your laugh, or hair,
i feel you in things we saw and imagined,
and i remember you, just by losing sleep, in the dark
that once held us there

The Forgotten Body

2007-06-15T20:04:00.000-07:00

I no longer recognize this body.

I no longer remember when I last had
a good, probing look - like a pulling,
like a tugging of waves
that starts with the hand and
ends with the heart.

I've forgotten the atlases of this body
where or when it last felt good,
felt giddy or felt achingly happy.
The landmarks have become deserts
caving in on itself.

I no longer remember this body
and sadly, frighteningly
I trace my steps back,
into a seemingly foreign land
swathed in dark landscapes
that the night claimed -
not as mysteries
not as legends
but as cloaks you shield
unused furniture with
that grows stale.

vacancy

2006-02-06T02:07:00.000-08:00

at times we find the heart, pitted at the bowels and backdoors of some peeling wall paper,
bruised and battered like the leaves of a stormy July, like cold coffee mugs, stolid, shriveling between november rains and blunt drizzles, like strangled keys and like hazy, distant city lights.
at times, we muzzle the heart
at times, we drown it
at times, it flops like fish out of water
but most times, we just let it lie,
waiting for morning like a grass to the dew,
staring at the infant sun for that faint ray in the swelling sky,
praying
to spill some grace, to thaw the skin
and pump the blood,
for we lie, not to forget, but to wait
and wake up
and find the lover's old perfume
muffled by other perfume, and the heart finally
packing the lovers' keeps and sweater,
keeping them behind peeling wallpapers,
dark closets, under kitchen sinks, and alleys.
And then it lies, once more, finding more room,
we swell and occupy every space.

Verses for Cramps

2006-01-09T09:26:00.000-08:00

utterly mad
i think i am, bleeding on the shrine
as the world flows between my legs
-the life, the moon, the tides
entering me all at once, cleansing and purifying
the myths and the lies,
when all i could imagine is sitting on a
cold slab of rock pointing at the sun
going east to burn the west,
and then laugh and scream as i stretch
the weary day off like my old skin and bones,
it would be lovely
divine
the pain stabbing me from toe
to tummy, a glassy smile
in my eyes

Piss Be With You

2005-11-13T23:44:00.000-08:00

When god pisses on you, do not look for shelter. Do not hide in the eaves of abandoned buildings and closed museums among shadows. Do not weep. Do not utter disdainly - we are doomed. our sins will be the end of us. Do not turn to scorn nor to regrets.
But laugh. Laugh till blood flows from your eyes and you deafen the thunder with your heehah's. Laugh till your body is screaming and tearing itself apart. Laugh from the pit of your bowels, from the calluses of your foot. Laugh till your hair touches your face like paper cuts. Laugh until the pavement is soggy and the air is filled with fog. Laugh, because when god takes a leak, he is laughing at you.