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Brown eyes cocker spaniel mournful,
when you’re home, all of you,
my wife, children
my sisters and brothers and cousins and their wives and husbands
then I’m so happy,
this house is alive, brimming.
Wherever I turn
I walk into grandsons, nephews, nieces,
tender new sprouts with differently similar faces, mannerisms,
I can’t move without touching somebody,
touching love,
that’s the way a house should be,
merry and full.
I look at him
and see his family through his eyes,
a carpenter’s production,
lives nailed together
lumpy and rough in some spots, smooth in others
but always joined.
I look at him and see daddy dear
dadaji bhaiya jeeja mausa aaja thakur pundit Sir,
so many lives in one.

Inpatient Hospice

You inhabit me; you narrow to flanks.
Your spineless nerves sear my ventricles.
The creative will will snap your cheekbone—
hush, soil, remains.
Look at the blank between us
squeezing my shoulders.

I breathed through your infamy
at graduation,
mingled, carried my orphaned part,
discarded in a scattering
of peers.

Your socked feet shake now,
betray what you outran:
weakness.
Face compressed to grooves, you
strain to unriddle me.
Your neck, the bruises,
an ardor of decomposition.

You mouth Yoplait,
stilled by the TV’s shifting colors
where an Olympian spirals.
A nurse checks the infusion.

I can’t piece
the fragments
we are
to make you solid
and keep me safe.
You cut my lyric free
of source.

In quiet tones, a song is spun,
A tribute whispered to the sun.
It speaks of those who’ve gone ahead,
Yet lingers softly where they tread.

Each line a bridge, a gentle stream,
Connecting life to love’s deep dream.
The past and present intertwine,
Through words that shimmer, hearts align.

A melody of loss and light,
Transforms the dark, renews the night.
In every tear, a star will rise,
A beacon bright in endless skies.

It carries sorrow, yet bestows
A peace that only memory knows.
Through whispered winds and tender rain,
It offers solace in the pain.

For love persists beyond the veil,
Its gentle whispers never fail.
Though shadows fall, their light will stay,
A quiet song to guide the way.

hope / is a secret / is closed doors / is nestled in the way wind softens when it meets glass / is the hum of the kettle before it sings to the plant on the windowsill you water even though it hasn’t sprouted / is the smell of banana bread before it’s done baking / is the jewel-toned dreams I’ve been having lately / is the unlit room at the end of the hall / is your grandmother’s cockatiel singing the both of them to sleep / is the way your phone hums after months of silence / is their voice crackling through bad reception telling you they always knew you’d call / is the memory of laughter braided so tight it still feels like a handshake across state lines / is the shared shorthand for everything that hurts the way they know before you’ve got the courage to say it / is their silence on the other end of the line filling the gaps you couldn’t manage to close yourself / learning to dance to the sing of the sting / is the ache that feels lighter when split between two / is the matching necklaces we got when we were fourteen the metal worn down tarnished by time and sweat and things we thought we knew / is the things we keep heavy around our necks like something we can’t let go of / is not dazzling not loud not the sharp bite of joy but the soft breath of maybe / is the quiet hum of waiting / is the feeling of something coming home

I guess I’ve never felt like a woman
or a woman-shaped something stuffed
with satin daisies and surrounded by soft
flaps of labia cupping the outside like a
body bag or maybe I guess I’ve never
really felt like a wo-man or a hu-man or
any word suffixed by man

I’ve felt what alone sounds like a small
child five or six crouched knees on the
sidewalk of the motel waiting for Mother
to return I noticed an open numbered door
and an infant two or three months crying
on the rung mattress against the wall

I’ve felt what weight may mean an adult
eighteen or nineteen and a man pointing to
the blood I left on his dorm mattress and my
eyes unable to notice a color other than
the heavy coated red

I’ve felt what beautiful could mean whenever
I’m alone and I can hear less people asking
for me to pay attention I can close my eyes and
picture myself a puddle or a cat or a bowl
that you could put the nicest things into

And I guess a bowl or a cat or a puddle
could all be vaginas or vagina shaped things
wet things or new things or things
very alone but what I see inside
is a thing I can’t trace and a wetness that feels
sticky heavy bears red blood tears of infants
alone

I guess I’ve never really felt like a woman or
a person connected to the humps of my body or
thickness of my blood I often wish to be
a cerulean insect whose iridescent wings
glow red only in the peak of light and whose
lifespan is only long enough to learn
what together feels like

This week, I learned how to measure myself for a cock
ring. It only takes a piece of string and pen. Memory
of fractions comes rusty, finding a common denominator
is almost as hard as finding a lover. If my friends asked
me to teach them, I’d let them drop trou, wrap soft
teal yarn behind scrotum and over the base of their
member, mark a line like a parent to a door frame, teach
them to wear our shame like a crown. I do this, because
I love them. I love them in the dark room harnessed
and jockstrapped. I love them when they’re fucking
bottoms off Grindr. I love them when I pray to God,
and there’s a joke hidden here about kneeling, but I’ve
floated my face to VHS cleaner like birthday candles
enough to know you are a wish come true my sister,
with your estranged parents and disbelief in God,
so when I say I pray for you I mean, give me your
shame, and I will stake wax letters that spell out faggot
atop strawberry cake, laugh in the face of what and
who has tried killing us, and maybe we live fast,
because we never expected to be here this long,
like the circle of life is holding back your blood
long enough to stand up and shoot.

I don’t remember your voice.
Only twenty good photographs sheathed from the box,
displace your face, mostly a distant mystery—
the wide brow in sunlight or distorted darkness of deep-set eyes.
A camera’s blurred lens creates the shadow I cannot lighten.
Your sleeves were buttoned at cuff, or rolled,
though always tucked and proper,
clothes to fit occasions, farm or social, each the same.
You were so at ease among family,
laughter sometimes consumed your face, broke the stone-like illusion
of austerity that these images endow upon the mind.
You still intrigue me after all the years that lie between these pictured thoughts of ink.

I was five or six when you died, vague memories unforgotten,
images, gestures; grandma reaching into the casket for
my father’s father, who planted twelve pines
of mystic shape, even as some had scoffed.
There were places among hill-rocks of the house whose
boards were made from trees of this very land.
Match-box cars made tiny roads,
diamond glints of sandstone— imagined treasure my Tonka hauled.
You let me climb to the wood’s edge,
not as far as ridges, shallow caves or cliff ledges,
and your eyes could see my every move.
Though you would often only grin, sometimes I made you laugh.

There is not much I can know of you except through other people.
You left no journal, no thoughts, only catalogs of cattle sales,
store receipts and timber logs in forty-three;
tools, farm clothes, the few coins your sweat allowed.
What can I learn of you in photographs without forensic attitudes—
only how your face had changed, pieces of your character
through time revealed in subtle gestures now and then;
how you held your mother’s hand, the anger, mystery sometimes your eyes convey.
Tobacco-jawed beside a gutted buck hung in a tree,
another has your arms crossed, leaned back on
split pieces, wood you cut in summer heat;
one, with down-cast eyes, you break into a smile or rifle back a sleep-eyed leer.

I can’t remember your voice.
You exist in a place of half-mystery,
alluring unrecorded thoughts that question:
what have I imposed on things that I have seen
in this questionable space of black and white,
incomparable with fact or fixed brick in a world beyond knowledge?
The myth I made of your memory
was like a mirror of my own beliefs.
I realized, perhaps, even you had those flaws from years ago,
a lesser shade of hate, though I told myself you were just like me.
The seven-circle pattern of your infant’s gown creates a flower’s image.
You let me climb and climb and climb.

Dirt-worn boots tell their own about your work,
your life from day to day in pasture fields.
I could only wish the dust of life to cling to me the same.
Let me not forget this face and remember my true name.
All I have is a reasoned voice restrained.
Among the rows of books and thought
that were far away as dream.
I have your eyes to see your eyes,
to keep life here, ‘dream of the sky,’
and climb, and climb, and climb,
to find a solitary, untouchable way, that place horizon-level,
the center of this created universe.

Only photographs replace your voice with images;
Grandfather Pines that always stand
over oak and maple, along any ridge you turn your eyes to see.
They stand in rusted shade along umber paths
that trace this land through ridge-pocket rocks of malachite green,
where spring-house waters run creek to creek,
through briar thatch and rabbit bores, on grouse-wing
over each sedge-rung hollow’s hill-side where calls of owls remind me
of the place where you exist, as every night
I hear you, every night, your song rises through the fullness
of three seasons, through coldness of the winter into spring,
in me, your voice, climbs, and climbs, and climbs

To my love, oh for now and forever,
Our love was blessed with luck as if an endeavor.
But our hearts were solid and shined so bright,
Breaking through the twilight;
Always together, and always in sight.
So now do you remember, oh the times that we had?
Every waking moment, every day, we were glad.
I never wanted it to end, always wanted to stand by you,
Since nothing else really mattered since our debut.
For me it was you without adieu.
Forget me not, oh, how could I forget?
We were to be together from the moment we met.
Underneath the stars, warm in the cold weather,
Floating on our dreams like a cloud on a feather;
Yes, we were to be together.
Look in your heart, and oh you can see,
The joy and happiness that was meant to be.
Ask yourself what is plain and clear,
Please ask yourself and respond my dear,
Please believe, as I am sincere.

To whom I once was, oh once I could stand,
Now lost in the darkness searching for your hand,
But like an apparition – it just seeps through,
Oh, I don’t know if I ever knew you;
‘Cause now uncertainty is all that’s true.
Given all the time, oh the time we thought was there,
You looked into my eyes – told me to feel no despair
Taken by the crime of love’s constrain,
Forgetting all the time and letting in the pain;
Oblivious to that we were always singing in the rain.
The happier I can be, oh, the less I can recall.
Let it all go when I thought I had it all.
Forgot everyone and everyone forgot all about me,
All that remains is the past’s debris.
Oblivion is where I am – lost in a dead sea.
Happiness was it, oh, was that what it’s called?
Because in my case I was simply appalled,
While falling into the deepest abyss,
All I could remember is that they say ignorance is bliss.
I won’t ever miss your kiss.

Whatever happened, oh whoever are, whatever the matter,
Doesn’t really matter because all truths are merely lies of shatter.
Today I cannot bring back tomorrow,
As what was taken was no borrow,
Oblivion forgets the sorrow.

Perfumed clouds that echo twilight
lassoing the tongue,
seducing with full bodies –
I revel in your varied moods.

Darjeeling plies me
in its golden-tipped softness bittersweet.
I sink into the lusty hairy contours
of lapsang souchoung, curled like
smoke around my lips.
I fly into thought through the bold
humbleness of genmai green,
its toasty astringency a shroud
of knowledge.
Ceylon and I glide moonwards,
its thick body brittle, heaving and heavy.
Osmanthus floats me through the islanded
stream perfumed.
I cling with Assam and Nilgiri to high steep cliffs of days.

But I always come home again
and curl into nights dancing with the misty
loveliness of jasmine –
soft and shiny silver cloud.

Tiny tantrum
on my plate,
magenta-mad
bub of bad,

yapper, you
blister, you
hard-hot knot of yowl,
ounce of ow,

little cuss
in combat,
you’re the peeve,
the hidden pearl.