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