Category: Uncategorized

In memory of Laurie

I found you in the obits.
We held hands during the 80s.
My old man drove us to the concert.
We were destined to marry.

We held hands during the 80s.
Sorry I was late for the party.
We were destined to marry.
I hated you for wanting that singer.

Sorry I was late for the party.
Notes from our song play in my head.
I hated you for wanting that singer.
You wore tight white cords.

Notes from our song play in my head.
My old man drove us to the concert.
You wore tight white cords.
I found you in the obits.

In Loving Memory of Patrick Ewing (died August 8th, 2012, age 34)

I don’t want to romanticize any of this,
make it about poetry,
as if he only dreamed in verse
like the way language learners mouth their first syllables
deep in REM.

I still remember that writing workshop where my poem snapped
him in half, like a schoolhouse pencil:

July 17, 2008

My mother died today
July 17, 1997….

It was stupid for my sister and me to leave
her side an hour ago
when she struggled to breathe
even a cupful of air.

The blue in his eyes dimmed
red sadness filled in its place.
I continued to read the poem
the blue fading even further like dusk.
Before the last word could break me
I left the room to cry for my mother.

I didn’t see him leave that day.
He said he dropped to the ground outside
the workshop and did push-ups
blood coursing through his muscles
heart beats out of whack
desperate to feel anything but this.
He never told me why
he had to make the pain stop that day.

For my own sadness, I need to romanticize this part:

I want to believe that he dreamed in verse
when he pulled the sweaty trigger
words filled the soft wound, overflowing,
falling,
to the ground like roses.
words large as caterpillars
metamorphosed into butterflies
words small as ants
carrying away
the ghosts of his past.

My old friend Jeremy died today;
Or Wednesday, I forgot.

It is hard to count the years of yesterday tricklings
through ancient fingers like sand. I employ
overused metaphor, because I am afraid that
I never knew Jeremy, he was a hard man, bitter
edges of diamond-titanium wonder, threatening to
sparkle with rainbow glory in Amish moonlight. He
hailed from Rocklin, or so I believe, and he liked to vape
and suck cock, and stare blankly into over-mature spaces–

he liked to forget, mainly.

We were close and then we were not—
He fell out with everyone he loved, like a trustfall,
to love someone is to trust them, and it always
falls through.

I employ these stale idioms because I am afraid
that I do not know Jeremy, and I do not know
where he has gone. I am a Christian, and Jeremy
was not, but I am more than Christianity. God is
the color of many tints, he represents in
myriads of forms, Krishna blinks, and then it is
Mohammed. I believe this is so. Jeremy
did not like religion, or meat-eaters, or himself—

Truthfully, when Jeremy died, it was no surprise–

One could say he was one of those people who were not tailored
for life, it didn’t fit him, the monotonous ideals, the circuitous
arcs. He was not responsible and he was not happy;
Maybe, he could have become those things. I do not
know.

I do not know how he died;
I had not thought about him for so long, and then his cousin said
he is dead, he is dead

And it was like hope deflating–
A balloon drifting away from static circus
To find new horizons, to explode in a humid atmosphere.
They said that he was doing better, that he was finding treatment
for his addictions. I trusted them, because I did not know
him.

And Jeremy might have died for me a long time ago–
I ceased to know him until two years ago. He
did not talk to me. He was afraid of me, or
he was afraid of that sort of intimacy, a platonic
hope.

And for me, I think that maybe, Jeremy died today–
Or maybe he’ll die some other day, when the ache of existential knife
seizes itself from my breast, when I stop hearing his voice
amongst the honeysuckle shade, when I do not drive around Sacramento
to those extraneous plazas, and I do not see him beside me vaping
or Googling, or hesitating to laugh.

The people
we share moments with, even if it is a month, or a minute,
they shape us, or at least they shape me. I see them like I see
inimitable clay, and I welcome imprintations, new structures, various
memories. Jeremy changed me, and I thought lazily that he
was getting better.

for Uncle “Captain” Jim

An expression for patience
I try to understand:

Delicate tension in his arms,
his back and legs, his entire body,
became ill all at once.

Don’t feel too bad,
the symptoms are
almost always invisible.

Eyes mirrors on water’s surface
same color, same peace,
stay still as stone.

He would hold me up to the
Indiana Jones pinball machine,
a gunshot launch into
dust-colored adventure.

My aunt had to sell all those things.
She tells us she misses
‘coffee with a kiss’
mornings most.

He held a thumbs up
to the phone when he
couldn’t speak anymore.

Remember before the years betrayed us?
Marked and scraped us?
I take a look at my hands
In the mirror, in my eyes
There is a tiredness that cannot be named.

Do you remember?
Do you want to go back?
Would you take a chance knowing that
This is the outcome?
That we became who we are.

An asymptote is a series of lines that grow
Closer together in mathematics
But they never intersect
I was always just close enough to you
But never to touch.

Are we destined for this to be our lifetime?
You – warm and full but never
Quite in reach and I
Angled and disjointed, can it be fixed?
Can it be fixed? Can I be fixed?

A note on Asymptote: This poem was written as a way to honor the “death” of the longest relationship I had ever been in. We had been together for 4 years, with the last year marked with a long list of hardships. By the end, we knew that there was nothing more left between us. While I knew I needed to let go, I always wondered if it was something I would ever want to live through again. Thus, this poem was written to reflect on that death and consider the human condition through a complicated and unhealthy romantic relationship

The constant rainfall willingly confines us to each other
I’ve never liked monsoon season before

The world I once knew is muffled
smells, sights, sounds
I can hear them, without the same sharpness
I can see them, without the same clarity

Father time will return when the weather dries
with sharp fear, excitement
the loud shimmer,
the bubble pop

My bag is empty to eyes not my own
but I can feel its weight
full of these moments
where I’m wrapped up
in him
in us
in the neat little bubble we’ve made

In dreams
the miasma of rebirth flows and
I wake with the sheets stained red
between my legs

It aches, the bottomless hole of
life, where my babies were
cursed

To die again in the darkness of
ignorance, with the first flutter of life
beating quickly and without meaning
a cluster of endless
possibility, endless
death.

I cannot go back to sleep
chasing reason with the lame
dogs of science barking,
at nothing
at shadows
at lies,
barking at every answer,
useless.

Faith is worse,
for the labor of death is angelic
and I have seen that real angels
die
and god’s love blisters
into the fiery pain of this hell
I am trying to escape…

What is a mother?
our aborted children bleed and
the womb consumes all
sacred miasma of flesh
drowning flush of desire and
a heartbeat that echoes
echoes on the scans into nothingness.
A mother is all
of her children.

I need to move my mewling
yearling, darling boy,
so the blood doesn’t touch him,
or his older brother quietly
blissfully
dreaming

and the rabbit rots patiently in the ditch,
thrashed apart by the ravenous pickings of
some nearby crows and i think

of you

the beauty of her vivisected innards
are punctuated by the sultry light,

you part my legs and sit between then,
how could i ever leave when you

splice my intestines with loving admiration,
when you make me feel so
disgustingly adequate

with my ill-tempered manifestation of
grievances that pile onto one
another with alarming velocity

how could i leave you when you force
me to become such a volatile
subject of my circumstances, and

the sting of your harsh touch lingers, pulling
my shirt down, red marks winding
across my flesh,

her glazed eyes meet mine; the rabbit’s body
is jerked along the highway, bits of red
dotting my vision as you lower your gaze

and i am picked apart, undressed for your
satisfaction again and again and again

My grandfather was never more
than a tale passed down in
black and white pictures.

As a child I shifted through
the stories of a dead man who
put up with California

long after the gold dried out
and the missions became museums,
only to retire to a living room

in the sprawled suburbs with a black
and white television and children
drafted to Vietnam.

And now, his ghost
leans over my shoulder
to rewrite his past.

He uses my hands to script legend
into history; reclaims the antiquity
prescribed in blood.

What tools are needed to build a man?
A few oral histories and
anecdotes shared on holidays.

A signature from Elise Island,
some pictures of a second wife
whose never returned from their honeymoon,

A book published in the 1940’s
and a short story my father wrote
about finding him near death

The handful of knowledge given
to me doesn’t differentiate between fact
or fabrication, truth or invention.

No one ever told me why
he came to America or why
he ended up in the West, when

the rest of the cousins rested on
the East coast. No one told me why
a 44 year old man from across

the ocean would take a 22 year old
girl from her home and bring her up to
a country she had never before seen.

Perhaps he believes I will
stack stories of glory and
wisdom out of the tales past down

But he is not here to tell me what
I got right and what I got wrong,
and there are so many holes to explore.

He didn’t realize I had
the power to fill in
the missing pictures.

He didn’t realize the calluses
he created by embedding heritage
on freckled palms in absence of luck.

He never suspected the curiosity
stirring in the mind of a child
had the power to create or destroy

I
Want
To write
About my
Grandmother because
Her spirit follows me around.

She
Is
Like a
Shadow on
My right side and she
Has the presence of a green heart.

I
Crawled
Out of
My body
And saw a prism
In the middle of the ceiling.

It
Was
A green
Triangle
When Uranus first
Entered the astrological

Sign
Of
Taurus
In 2018.
It felt like things changed too quickly.

She
Was
Near me
All over
California and
It felt like I relived her life.

I
Think
Stan is
Stupid and
Told someone to mess
With my medication one time.

He
Changed
My meds
Once a week
And later on I
Heard voices telling me to kill

Jan
And
Roger
On a farm.
At the hospital
I almost died from too much blood

Drawn
Out
Too fast
And I blacked
Out and didn’t wake
And an alarm went off and then

The
Nurse
Freaked out,
The doctor
Ran into the room,
And they gave me an IV and

I
Puked
Water
All over
My body and shook
And shivered and passed out to sleep.