i talk to volcanos most days, relating to eruption and hot messy dreams.

i talk to orange peels too,
the feeling of bitter next to sweet, and the dilemma it presents to me.

i think my limp can be attributed to unknown fires.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

- alice walker

I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat guiltily. I thought it was a substitute for something else -- well, for writing, for one thing. I wanted to write. But I became very engaged with all the things there were to be had out of the camera, and became very compulsive about it. it was a real drive. Particularly when the lighting was right, you couldn't keep me in...

I suppose I thought photographing was a minor thing to be doing. And I guess I thought I ought to be writing. In Paris, I had been trying to write. But in writing I felt blocked - mostly by my high standards. Writing's a very daring thing to do. I'd done a lot of reading, and I knew what writing was. But shy young men are seldom daring.

- walker evans

i remember us
us in the bed, in the torn up sheets, rotten and hungry from the midnight heat. i dust and i spin and recoil. in the middle of the night, i can feel your fingers tap-tapping the backs of my knees.

“I-love-you has no usages. Like a child’s word, it enters into no social constraint; it can be a sublime, solemn, trivial word, it can be an erotic, pornographic word. It’s a socially irresponsible word.”

- Roland Barthes

tengo alas para volar

-frida kahlo

"i was thinking last night about how it's so easy to fall in love with people who are clearly very wrong for us, but it takes time to grow into the kind of love that we share in our successful relationships." - s

but what is right, and which one is wrong?
and is love ever wrong?

soy nicaragua (or, "for sriram")

you smell like the soil on the slopes of volcanoes,
aching to be trodden with the heat of my skin.

electricity has never invented itself as it did through (y)our touch, and
our exchange of words swells quietly, vehemently, without remorse
like a pugliese piece
pregnant with restraint and vitality
as we tremble (un)willingly into the summer heat

conversation has consistently been our cartography,
be it in writing or pouring from our lips
i have spent years now translating these cross-continent journeys
into roads resembling spines-
and to you i have given years and uncountable routes of unfiltered light
...those years now just remnants dappled on the interstate lines--
as the words and "what-ifs" we leaned on so heavily
disappear suddenly in migratory flight

and with only seconds left i know now
"light is clever but conditional
depending on angles and time of day and eyes"

i am the threads that have woven your web
bending this far but not broken just yet.
without warning,
we turn over in sleep together, hazy in our cocoons,
and the bedsheets are now barren battlefields
of wars ending too soon

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.



william earnest henley

When you are so weak, give up to grace.
The ocean takes care of each wave
till it gets to shore.
- Rumi



water water water.

giving myself to the sea

strings of christmas lights make me think of waterfalls

i wake up to nightmares
trembling in your arms

i like the last three words

i think perhaps
i should let myself cry
free from fury, or doubt, or pity
or fear
or cloudiness

(or guilt, or guilt,)
( or guilt)
,

i am the sun
these tears
are my rays
extensions of
my heart

do (not) (do not)
wipe them away.

what is a spinal c(h)ord

if i use it not
if i use it knot

c# minor
is my key

i fold into myself
like origami, or
an overripe fruit
exaggerating my stance, gladiator and all,
high hanging
low swinging

sweet chariot


are we
you and i
but mirrors, too? confused and
injected with
such doubt and such force
by mere words, mere tones
mere sprinklings of song
i try
and think
you must be miserable
i woke up oneday
oneday
one day

and i realized.
how miserable
happiness
can be.

nocturne in c

If these are not the nights of empty hands,
if these are not the nights of dreams galloping
like gasoline fire over blue tar,
I wish you could see what I see
when I look at you,
I wish I could give you the country
in my skull, invisible
as the horizon I followed to your eyes --
an ocean mounting within, the foam
and drone of bile-black waters washing us closer
and farther apart, always both at once,
murmur of umber, bloodwings beating in bone.

You cannot see the waves breaking against welted shoals,
but in the rocking of our chair, maybe you hear
the whispering of the sea, biting acetylene,
or cries of tern and gull, brine-stung; maybe you hear
the uncaged waters gasping against hasp and hull,
bracken churning, scalps flensed from brine.
In your shirt's rustling, I hear sailcloth in wind,
ropes lashed and pulling against the mast.
In our chair's rasp against pine boards, I hear
the creak of oarlocks, a broken scull scraping against keel.
I hear spume soaking a bowsprit crisped with salt,
as I rock into your torso, my human shore.

Come nearer, nearer,
for I want to see what you see --
Light a lighthouse over these broken spars
dress me in burlap and tackle,
play on a streel of eelgrass plucked from the troughs of the sea;
charm me with bladderwrack and sole, comfort me
with a severed branch of coral, a fistful of wet wings;
sing to me of splintered driftwood and rockweed, nights full of sulfur foam;
lead me through the narcotic dark to a bed
of coats, your stubbled face grazing my throat,
for I want to lie with your eyelids touching my lips when I sleep,
I want to feel the bones of your silence pressing against my own.

I cannot see what you see, but I will paint you
a world in green, the color you most love:
I will weave you a pillow of aloe and flowering lime,
cut you a bed of wild ginger, causarina and bamboo;
I will make you a city where you may dance
on bridges and rooftops of air, where you may hear
green wind blowing across green water.
Because I can’t know how long the shore we make together
will hold, let me lie against you
before the waves we are wash us from each other’s arms,
before that stopless tide returns,
when we’ll feel the indifference of the sea.


suji kwock kim

we move toward each other like tectonic dreams
mushaboom mushaboom, are we in tune?
like stringed instruments in a forest,
abstract and subdued

our kneecaps in hiding, like there is something to fear

He was fond of movies, movies of Latin America and disillusioned liberals, old-fashioned heroes and not-so-ordinary couples in love. He was fond of making them too, fitting scripts into cafes and plots into narrow alleyways. They met alone at a coffee shop, and in a matter of moments, they were convinced of each other's stories, and of that age-old idea that "there is something out there that is bigger than the both of us and we have to find it, you and I, we'll find it."

She sent him miradas in Catorce, he remained unsettled through December, and just as suddenly the stories ended. And that “something out there” remained out there and bigger than the both of them. In a fit of sadness, he dove back into self-imposed solitary confinement and the Moonlight sonata, and his individual dreams suddenly seemed like performances lost in their own expired cinema. But stories remain, whether of winged goddesses or Garcia Marquez's fortune tellers, and those shared between a boy and a girl remain more tangled than most.

"Aching is happiness," he read somewhere, and he realized that it would outlive his soft, melting heart and this lack of defense was perhaps the best defense to its presence. And as the months passed by, he began to smile with ease at the melodies of the Spring mornings that begin too early, stretching, to seemingly never end.

On a southern Wednesday night, he remembered her as he passed by the choreographed escalators, her with her funny-shaped nose and curious brown eyes. And on one, mythic, fabled night, he looked at her, those soft cheeks, and whispered to her rosy lips, "Sweet girl, tell me those stories again."

With a mischievous look on her face, as if she had known all along, she began, "There is something out there..."


----


i was really in love with him.

If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn't see her. If he saw her, he couldn't feel her. If he touched her he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win

-the god of small things

sometimes our love is quiet, elbows resting on the face of water
sometimes it is abrupt like chaos, dropping sharply off into the darkness, brooding, dark, uncooperative. it throws a temper tantrum and begs for lightning from the skies.

sometimes our love is insistent.

the skin on our chests a different color, you from me and i from you

the trains of our hearts pass by, with no less sound than from our lips

why, then, o brawling love
o loving hate
o any thing, of nothing first create
o heavy lightness! serious vanity
misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms
feather of lead,
bright smoke,
cold fire,
sick health
still-waking sleep, that is not what it is
this love feel i, that feel no love in this.

shakespeare

constructing walls
not so much to keep you out, but more to keep what's left of me - in.

scientists who think with their hearts and feel with their minds

lately i've been pretty smitten by the idea of bookshelves.

or, just shelving in general.

last night we ate wings. but not the kind with which we fly.

"Ne te quaesiveris extra."
“Do not seek yourself outside yourself.”
- Persius, Satires. and Emerson.

“Be yourself and don’t try to impress other people, which is really hard, but in order to succeed you need to impress yourself.”
- 13-year-old Adelaide Rose

what is being comfortable?
are we bored by satisfaction?
are we all aiming towards
a place called home, or something
close to that-
do we want a story to tell? or do
stories just define us
Us
US

it's Arbitrary anyways,
this art and attrition and suffering,
Artificial, even. but maybe more real than this love.
any time she throws love in the mix,
she has to realize that nothing will make sense
it's all Subjective anyways.

What is being compared?
Do I compare myself, or how does the world
compare to me?

i see through lenses of inequality

unmoveable
someone else.

it's been too long
since i felt comfort

don't worry, our prophecies change based on our desires and decisions.

the beat that my heart skipped
is spread out in the cold

i'm butter and you're bread,
the snow quietly said.

we are understated
we are tentative
what good can i do with warmth, nowadays?

she has hands like paper planes
folded -
- in waiting.


some times, meticulously shaped
at others, a careless heap


more often than not, they miss where they are going
but sometimes,
they end up
exactly where they were meant to be.

William Faulkner once said: "The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again, since it is life."

20 minutes

time stretches like a bedsheet
across the shape of the mattress
i hear the springs groan a little
but not from weight, no

the pillows whisper to me
and this is the heartbeat
clik
clik
clok


what is ambition?

his minute is my hour
what does that mean??

why are we efficient in different ways
what is efficiency anyways?

he has eyes
like the weather
they mist when it is dark outside,
or rather, the texture becomes
maybe more like fog, or like the dewy grass when dusk approaches.

the weight of the afternoon spills into the cloudy sunlight (cloudy like your eyes)
your hair tousled
i am wondering where i led us
why i feel punished for speaking my heart

because if i apologize for the way i feel, i apologize for who i am.

"i never learned how to go slow,"
he said
while casually winding down Highway One
"it's really a tapestry," he says,
"these invisible cities woven into one."
he's convinced it's easier to go fast-
it's less painful that way,
or something like that.

we stand on the beach together-
our feet pocketing the holes in the sand
the wind plays freeze tag with my hair
there's madness, but i haven't found a method yet
or rhythm, for that matter.
except perhaps when we point north, there is no north
direction's just an illusion, man, we're just here to
grip the handlebars
keep riding, keep on riding
after a while
i hear your voice in my ear again
"Does our departure create arrival?"

i'm not sure until you define each
"departure:"
"arrival:"
definitions written on my body with your hands

and then i know
yes,
god yes,
i've arrived.

she has hands like strawberries
round- small, and dimpled
when she speaks they tremble
and pucker,
and i know you would have to cover them
when the frost comes seeping in.

après moi le déluge

after me comes
the flood,
i whisper.

when he says "no" in russian,
suddenly i think of her brown hair spilling across the pillow
and i shake my head, "niet" (нет)
to this never lived memory

the afternoon tapers into highway
that's the way i define Time
in a place like houston

this place that swallows and clings to my bottles of dreams
half-assedly stored away.

what are the kinds of unhappiness? let me count the ways
perhaps i'm trembling and beyond your fingertips not because i am unhappy
but because you need to adjust your ambition, or your reach, or something in between


aren't we just migratory birds
and don't the seasons dictate our rise and decline?
like history books and
sunsets
or melodramas on tv


après moi le déluge

5am

I am safe here.


There are haunting melodies of accordion and violin encasing our embrace.

I am safe here, as the flood of light that usually follows the break of dawn is subdued by the curtains of our movement. Our feet follow something, they are not aimless, they are not invisible or ignored for this period in time. I am safe here, among the silent handbells and the fortresses of solitude that we break through. Our cravings of closeness are camouflaged yet resolute. I am safe here, because perhaps this is our halcyon moment- we ebb and flow together, but we are not waves, we are not of the wind. We are children together, or we are of the leaves- one of the two, or both. I haven't decided. Roots, and arms, and branches, and dreams.

We trade cities between our eyes (sometimes between our cheeks), and we are like a nuptial procession, seeing each other for the very first time.
I am safe here, because though the ambulances sleep soundly, your arms are awake
around me.

september 8, 2009

from dreams come days of

dreams are useful in compacting days,
or helping my eyes to hide behind curtains
of haziness or fog
the kind that collects in airy containers outside my windowsill

i know quietude wraps itself
like a shawl, or something made of gauze

it's dangerous to know myself
kind of like
cooking with knives that are bigger than my hands


i have a plan
this micro plan
to live
to laugh

is it cliche?

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the backgroud; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Li-Young Lee

response to addie

because i trusted you i gave my body to you
petals and skin and all
delicately peeled, open and bare.

you told me (you claimed) you wouldn't stay long,
but in your eyes i saw the ocean's expanse,
(reaching to the horizon, no, even longer)
i judged your waters to be ready, i judged me one with the sea

and suddenly
at that moment
you were astral, yellow,
you were overbearing like a sunburn
(superficial heat, the kind that simmers and then recedes)

embrace upon embrace, without invitation or reproach,
your arm holding, no, carrying my spine,
your roots reaching into, violating freshly tilled soil,

and i closed my eyes, i gave up me, i gave up everything
just like a good girl ought to

and i got lost (lodged) in your throat, between the music and the sea,
i couldn't find my face, i couldn't find the rest of me

you are missing, and with you went my body,
petals and skin and all
just an echo of persephone