Flicker Shimmer Glow

The brightest star can shine even with thick black velvet draped over it.  
Quartz, lime and salt crystals formed a glass ball.
The dark womb held me, warm and soft.  
My mom called my cries when I was born the most sorrowful sound she had ever heard.  
She said she’d never heard a baby make a sound like that.    
I’d open my eyes in low light until the world’s light healed rather than hurt.  
The summer before eighth grade, July 1992,
I watched a shooting star burn by at 100,000 miles per hour as I stood on the balcony  
while my family celebrated my birthday inside.  
It made it into the earth’s atmosphere
but it didn’t look like it was coming down;
I know it didn’t hit the ground but it burned something in the time it was here.  
The glass ball of my life cracked inside.  
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks.  
I saw the beauty of the light within.  
Nacre from my shell kept those cracks from getting worse,
a wild pearl as defense mechanism.  
In 2001, I quit my job after they melted and poured tar all over my life.  
All summer literature class bathtubs filled with rose hip oil cleaned the tar.  
That fall logic and epistemology classes spewed black ink all over my philosophy
written over ten years then.  
Tar turned to asphalt when I met someone from my old job for a drink in November
and it paved a road for my life that went to the hospital I was in that December
where it sealed the roof on my life
when I was almost murdered there
and in February after meeting her for another drink.  
They lit a fire at the top of the glacier and pushed the burning pile of black coal off the edge,
burnt red, looking like flames falling into the valley.  
While that blazed the side of the cliff something lit an incandescent light.  
The electricity from the metal lightbulb ***** went through wires and heated the filament between until it glowed.  
I began putting more work into emotional balance from things I learned at AA meetings.  
In Spring 2003, the damage that the doctors at the hospital in 2001 had done
made it harder for light to reflect from the cracks in the glass ball.
I’d been eating healthy and trying to get regular exercises since 1994
but in Spring 2003 I began swimming for an hour every morning .  
The water washed the pollution from the burning coals off
And then I escaped in July.  
I moved to London to study English Language and Linguistics.  
I would’ve studied English Language and Literature.  
I did well until Spring 2004 when I thought I was being stalked.  
I thought I was manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I went home and didn’t go back for my exams after spring holiday.  
Because I felt traumatized and couldn’t write poetry anymore,
I used black ink to write my notes for my book on trauma and the Russian Revolution.
I started teaching myself German.  
I stayed healthy.  
In 2005, my parents went to visit my mom’s family in Malaysia for two weeks.
I thought I was being stalked.  
I knew I wasn’t manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I told my parents when they came home.  
They thought I was manic.  
I showed them the shoe prints in the snow of different sizes from the woods to the windows.  
They thought I was manic.  
I was outside of my comfort zone.  
I moved to California. I found light.  
I made light,
the light reflected off the salt crystals I used to heal the violence inflicted on me from then on.  
The light turned the traffic lights to not just green from red
but amber and blue.  
The light turned the car signals left and right.  
The light reflected off of salt crystals, light emitting diodes,
electrical energy turned directly to light,
electroluminescence.  
The electrical currents flowed through,
illuminating.  
Alone in the world, I moved to California in July 2005
but in August  I called the person I escaped in 2003,
the sulfur and nitrogen that I hated.  
He didn’t think I was manic but I never said anything.
I never told him why I asked him to move out to California.  
When his coal seemed like only pollution,
I asked him to leave.  
He threatened me.  
I called the authorities.  
They left me there.
He laughed.  
Then the violence came.  
****:  stabbed and punched, my ****** bruised, purple and swollen.  
The light barely reflected from the glass ball wIth cracks through all the acid rain, smoke and haze.
It would take me half an hour to get my body to do what my mind told it to after.  
My dad told me my mom had her cancer removed.
The next day, the coal said if I wanted him to leave he’d leave.  
I booked his ticket.
I drove him to the airport.  
Black clouds gushed the night before for the first time in months,
the sky clear after the rain.  
He was gone and I was free,
melted glass, heated up and poured—
looked like fire,
looked like the Snow Moon in February
with Mercury in the morning sky.  
I worked through ****.  
I worked to overcome trauma.  
Electricity between touch and love caused acid rain, smoke, haze, and mercury
to light the discharge lamps, streetlights and parking lot lights.
Then I changed the direction of the light waves.  
Like lead glass breaks up the light,
lead from the coal, cleaned and replaced by potassium,
glass cut clearly, refracting the light,
electrolytes,
electrical signals lit through my body,
thick black velvet drapes gone.  





















Lava

I think that someone wrote into some palm leaf a manuscript, a gift, a contract.  
After my parents wedding, while they were still in India,
they found out that my dad’s father and my mom’s grandfather worked for kings administering temples and collecting money for their king from the farmers that worked the rice paddies each king owned.  They both left their homes before they left for college.  
My dad, a son of a brahmin’s son,
grew up in his grandmother’s house.  
His mother was not a Brahmin.  
My mother grew up in Malaysia where she saw the children from the rubber plantation
when she walked to school.  
She doesn’t say what caste she is.  
He went to his father’s house, then college.  
He worked, then went to England, then Canada.  
She went to India then Canada.  
They moved to the United States around Christmas 1978
with my brother while she was pregnant with me.  
My father signed a contract with my mother.  
My parents took ashes and formed rock,
the residue left in brass pots in India,
the rocks, so hot, they turned back to lava miles away before turning back to ash again,
then back to rock,
the lava from a super volcano,
the ash purple and red.  


















Circles on a Moss Covered Volcano

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My mom was born on the grass
on a lawn
in a moss covered canyon at the top of a volcanic island.  
My grandfather lived in Malaysia before the Japanese occupied.  
When the volcano erupted,
the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.  
The British allied with the Communist Party of Malaysia—
after they organized.  
After the Americans defeated the Japanese at Pearl Harbor,
the British took over Malaysia again.  
They kept different groups apart claiming they were helping them.  
The black sand had smooth pebbles and sharp rocks.  
Ethnic Malay farmers lived in Kampongs, villages.  
Indians lived on plantations.  
The Chinese lived in towns and urban areas.  
Ethnic Malays wanted independence.
In 1946, after strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts
the British agreed to work with them.  
The predominantly Chinese Communist Party of Malaysia went underground,
guerrilla warfare against the British,
claiming their fight was for independence.  
For the British, that emergency required vast powers
of arrest, detention without trial and deportation to defeat terrorism.  
The Emergency became less unpopular as the terrorism became worse.  
The British were the iron that brought oxygen through my mom’s body.  
She loved riding on her father’s motorcycle with him
by the plantations,
through the Kampongs
and to the city, half an hour away.  
The British left Malaysia independent in 1957
with Malaysian nationalists holding most state and federal government offices.  
As the black sand stretches towards the ocean,
it becomes big stones of dried lava, flat and smooth.  

My mom thought her father and her uncle were subservient to the British.  
She thought all things, all people were equal.  
When her father died when she was 16, 1965,
they moved to India,
my mother,
a foreigner in India, though she’s Indian.  
She loved rock and roll and mini skirts
and didn’t speak the local language.  
On the dried black lava,
it can be hard to know the molten lava flickers underneath there.  
Before the Korean War,
though Britain and the United States wanted
an aggressive resolution
condemning North Korea,
they were happy
that India supported a draft resolution
condemning North Korea
for breach of the peace.  
During the Korean War,
India, supported by Third World and other Commonwealth nations,
opposed United States’ proposals.
They were able to change the U.S. resolution
to include the proposals they wanted
and helped end the war.  
China wanted the respect of Third World nations
and saw the United States as imperialist.  
China thought India was a threat to the Third World
by taking aid from the United States and the Soviets.  
Pakistan could help with that and a seat at the United Nations.  
China wanted Taiwan’s seat at the UN.
My mother went to live with her uncle,
a communist negotiator for a corporation,
in India.  
A poet,
he threw parties and invited other artists, musicians and writers.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation at my joints that he had.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.  
In 1965, Pakistani forces went into Jammu and Kashmir with China’s support.  
China threatened India after India sent its troops in.  
Then they threatened again before sending their troops to the Indian border.  
The United States stopped aid to Pakistan and India.
Pakistan agreed to the UN ceasefire agreement.  
Pakistan helped China get a seat at the UN
and tried to keep the west from escalating in Vietnam.  
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
When West Pakistan refused to allow East Pakistan independence,
violence between Bengalis and Biharis developed into upheaval.  
Bengalis moved to India
and India went into East Pakistan.  
Pakistan surrendered in December 1971.  
East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh

The warm light of the melted lava radiates underneath but burns.  
In 1974, India tested the Smiling Buddha,
a nuclear bomb.  
After Indira Gandhi’s conviction for election fraud in 1973,
Marxist Professor Narayan called for total revolution
and students protested all over India.  
With food shortages, inflation and regional disputes
like Sikh separatists training in Pakistan for an independent Punjab,
peasants and laborers joined the protests.  
Railway strikes stopped the economy.  
In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady,
declared an Emergency,
imprisoning political opponents, restricting freedoms and restricting the press,
claiming threats to national security
because the war with Pakistan had just ended.  
The federal government took over Kerala’s communist dominated government and others.  

My mom could’ve been a dandelion, but she’s more like thistle.  
She has the center that dries and flutters in the wind,
beautiful and silky,
spiny and prickly,
but still fluffy, downy,
A daisy.
They say thistle saved Scotland from the Norse.  
Magma from the volcano explodes
and the streams of magma fly into the air.  
In the late 60s,
the civil rights movement rose
against the state in Northern Ireland
for depriving Catholics
of influence and opportunity.
The Northern Irish police,
Protestant and unionist, anti-catholic,
responded violently to the protests and it got worse.  
In 1969, the British placed Arthur Young,
who had worked at the Federation of Malaya
at the time of their Emergency
at the head of the British military in Northern Ireland.
The British military took control over the police,
a counter insurgency rather than a police force,
crowd control, house searches, interrogation, and street patrols,
use of force against suspects and uncooperative citizens.  
Political crimes were tolerated by Protestants but not Catholics.  
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.  

On January 30, 1972, ****** Sunday,  
British Army policing killed 13 unarmed protesters
fighting for their rights over their neighborhood,
protesting the internment of suspected nationalists.
That led to protests across Ireland.  
When banana leaves are warmed,
oil from the banana leaves flavors the food.  
My dad flew from Canada to India in February 1972.  
On February 4, my dad met my mom.  
On February 11, 1972,
my dad married my mom.  
They went to Canada,
a quartz singing bowl and a wooden mallet wrapped in suede.  
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.  
In March 1972, the British government took over
because they considered the Royal Ulster Police and the Ulster Special Constabulary
to be causing most of the violence.  
The lava blocks and reroutes streams,
melts snow and ice,
flooding.  
Days later, there’s still smoke, red.  
My mom could wear the clothes she liked
without being judged
with my dad in Canada.  
She didn’t like asking my dad for money.
My dad, the copper helping my mother use that iron,
wanted her to go to college and finish her bachelors degree.
She got a job.  
In 1976, the police took over again in Northern Ireland
but they were a paramilitary force—
armored SUVs, bullet proof jackets, combat ready
with the largest computerized surveillance system in the UK,
high powered weapons,
trained in counter insurgency.  
Many people were murdered by the police
and few were held accountable.  
Most of the murdered people were not involved in violence or crime.  
People were arrested under special emergency powers
for interrogation and intelligence gathering.  
People tried were tried in non-jury courts.  
My mom learned Malayalam in India
but didn’t speak well until living with my dad.  
She also learned to cook after getting married.  
Her mother sent her recipes; my dad cooked for her—
turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and green chiles.  
Having lived in different countries,
my mom’s food was exposed to many cultures,
Chinese and French.
Ground rock, minerals and glass
covered the ground
from the ash plume.  
She liked working.  

A volcano erupted for 192 years,
an ice age,
disordered ices, deformed under pressure
and ordered ice crystals, brittle in the ice core records.  
My mother liked working.  
Though Khomeini was in exile by the 1970s in Iran,
more people, working and poor,
turned to him and the ****-i-Ulama for help.
My mom didn’t want kids though my dad did.
She agreed and in 1978 my brother was born.
Iran modernized but agriculture and industry changed so quickly.  
In January 1978, students protested—
censorship, surveillance, harassment, illegal detention and torture.  
Young people and the unemployed joined.  
My parents moved to the United States in December 1978.  
The regime used a lot of violence against the protesters,
and in September 1978 declared martial law in Iran.  
Troops were shooting demonstrators.
In January 1979, the Shah and his family fled.  
On February 11, 1979, my parents’ anniversary,
the Iranian army declared neutrality.  
I was born in July 1979.
The chromium in emeralds and rubies colors them.
My brother was born in May and I was born in July.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.  





Warm Light Shatters

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My dad was born on a large flat rock on the edge of the top
of a hill,
Molasses, sweet and dark, the potent flavor dominates,
His father, the son of a Brahmin,
His mother from a lower caste.
His father’s family wouldn’t touch him,
He grew up in his mother’s mother’s house on a farm.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation spot on my right hand that he has.

In 1901, D’Arcy bought a 60 year concession for oil exploration In Iran.
The Iranian government extended it for another 32 years in 1933.
At that time oil was Iran’s “main source of income.”
In 1917’s Balfour Declaration, the British government proclaimed that they favored a national home for the Jews in Palestine and their “best endeavors to facilitate the achievement” of that.

The British police were in charge of policing in the mandate of Palestine.  A lot of the policemen they hired were people who had served in the British army before, during the Irish War for Independence.  
The army tried to stop how violent the police were, police used torture and brutality, some that had been used during the Irish War for Independence, like having prisoners tied to armored cars and locomotives and razing the homes of people in prison or people they thought were related to people thought to be rebels.
The police hired Arab police and Jewish police for lower level policing,
Making local people part of the management.
“Let Arab police beat up Arabs and Jewish police beat up Jews.”

The lava blocks and reroutes streams, melts snow and ice, flooding.
In 1922, there were 83,000 Jews, 71,000 Christians, and 589,000 Muslims.
The League If Nations endorsed the British Mandate.
During an emergency, in the 1930s, British regulations allowed collective punishment, punishing villages for incidents.
Local officers in riots often deserted and also shared intelligence with their own people.
The police often stole, destroyed property, tortured and killed people.  
Arab revolts sapped the police power over Palestinians by 1939.

My father’s mother was from a matrilineal family.
My dad remembers tall men lining up on pay day to respectfully wait for her, 5 feet tall.  
She married again after her husband died.
A manager from a tile factory,
He spoke English so he supervised finances and correspondence.
My dad, a sunflower, loved her: she scared all the workers but exuded warmth to the people she loved.

Obsidian shields people from negative energy.
David Cargill founded the Burmah Oil Co. in 1886.
If there were problems with oil exploration in Burma and Indian government licenses, Persian oil would protect the company.  
In July 1906, many European oil companies, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others, allied to protect against the American oil company, Standard Oil.
D’Arcy needed money because “Persian oil took three times as long to come on stream as anticipated.”
Burmah Oil Co. began the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. as a subsidiary.
Ninety-seven percent of British Petroleum was owned by Burmah Oil Co.
By 1914, the British government owned 51% of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co.  
Anglo-Persian acquired independence from Burmah Oil and Royal Dutch Shell with two million pounds from the British government.

The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
In 1942, after the Japanese took Burma,
the British destroyed their refineries before leaving.
The United Nations had to find other sources of oil.
In 1943, Japan built the Burma-Thailand Railroad with forced labor from the Malay peninsula who were mostly from the rubber plantations.

The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In 1945. Japan destroyed their refineries before leaving Burma.
Cargill, Watson and Whigham were on the Burmah Oil Co. Board and then the Anglo Iranian Oil Co. Board.  

In 1936 Palestine, boycotts, work stoppages, and violence against British police officials and soldiers compelled the government to appoint an investigatory commission.  
Leaders of Egypt, Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq helped end the work stoppages.
The British government had the Peel Commission read letters, memoranda, and petitions and speak with British officials, Jews and Arabs.  
The Commission didn’t believe that Arabs and Jews could live together in a single Jewish state.
Because of administrative and financial difficulties the Colonial Secretary stated that to split Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was impracticable.  
The Commission recommended transitioning 250,000 Arabs and 1500 Jews with British control over their oil pipeline, their naval base and Jerusalem.  
The League of Nations approved.
“It will not remove the grievance nor prevent the recurrence,” Lord Peel stated after.
The Arab uprising was much more militant after Peel.  Thousands of Arabs were wounded, ten thousand were detained.  
In Sykes-Picot and the Husain McMahon agreements, the British promised the Arabs an independent state but they did not keep that promise.  
Representatives from the Arab states rejected the Peel recommendations.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution181 partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an international regime for the city of Jerusalem backed by the United States and the Soviet Union.  

The Israeli Yishuv had strong military and intelligence organization —-  
the British recognized that their interest was with the Arabs and abstained from the vote.  
In 1948, Israel declared the establishment of its state.  
Ground rock, minerals, and gas covered the ground from the ash plume.
The Palestinian police force was disbanded and the British gave officers the option of serving in Malaya.

Though Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy supported snd tried to get Israel to offer the Arabs concessions, it wasn’t a major priority and didn’t always approve of Israel’s plans.
Arabs that had supported the British to end Turkish rule stopped supporting the West.  
Many Palestinians joined left wing groups and violent third world movements.  
Seventy-eight percent of the territory of former Palestine was under Israel’s control.  

My dad left for college in 1957 and lived in an apartment above the United States Information services office.
Because he graduated at the top of his class, he was given a job with the public works department of the government on the electricity board.  
“Once in, you’ll never leave.”
When he wanted a job where he could do real work, his father was upset.
He broke the chains with bells for vespers.
He got a job in Calcutta at Kusum Products and left the government, though it was prestigious to work there.
In the chemical engineering division, one of the projects he worked on was to design a *** distillery, bells controlled by hammers, hammers controlled by a keyboard.
His boss worked in the United Kingdom for. 20 years before the company he worked at, part of Power Gas Corporation, asked him to open a branch in Calcutta.
He opened the branch and convinced an Industrialist to open a company doing the same work with him.  The branch he opened closed after that.  
My dad applied for labor certification to work abroad and was selected.  
His boss wrote a reference letter for my him to the company he left in the UK.  My dad sent it telling the company when he was leaving for the UK.  
The day he left for London, he got the letter they sent in the mail telling him to take the train to Sheffield the next day and someone from the firm would meet him at the station.  
His dad didn’t know he left, he didn’t tell him.
He broke the chains with chimes for schisms.


Anglo-Persian Oil became Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935.
The British government used oil and Anglo-Persian oil to fight communism, have a stronger relationship with the United States and make the United Kingdom more powerful.  
The National Secularists, the Tudeh, and the Communists wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and mobilized the Iranian people.
The British feared nationalization in Iran would incite political parties like the Secular Nationalists all over the world.  
In 1947, the Iranian government passed the Single Article Law that “[increased] investment In welfare benefits, health, housing, education, and implementation of Iranianization through substitution of foreigners” at Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
“Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made more profit in 1950 than it paid to the Iranian government in royalties over the previous half century.”
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company tried to negotiate a new concession and claimed they’d hire more Iranian people into jobs held by British and people from other nationalities at the company.
Their hospitals had segregated wards.  
On May 1, 1951, the Iranian government passed a bill that nationalized Anglo- Iranian Oil Co.’s holdings.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In August 1953, the Iranian people elected Mossadegh from the Secular Nationalist Party as prime minister.
The British government with the CIA overthrew Mossadegh using the Iranian military after inducing protests and violent demonstrations.  
Anglo-Iranian Oil changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
Iranians believe that America destroyed Iran’s “last chance for democracy” and blamed America for Iran’s autocracy, its human rights abuses, and secret police.

The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
In 1946, Executive Yuan wanted control over 4 groups of Islands in the South China Sea to have a stronger presence there:  the Paracels, the Spratlys, Macclesfield Bank, and the Pratas.
The French forces in the South China Sea would have been stronger than the Chinese Navy then.
French Naval forces were in the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. forces were in the Taiwan Strait, the British were in Hong Kong, and the Portuguese were in Macao.
In the 1950s, British snd U.S. oil companies thought there might be oil in the Spratlys.  
By 1957, French presence in the South China Sea was hardly there.  

When the volcano erupted, the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
By 1954, the Tudeh Party’s communist movement and  intelligence organization had been destroyed.  
Because of the Shah and his government’s westernization policies and disrespectful treatment of the Ulama, Iranians began identifying with the Ulama and Khomeini rather than their government.  
Those people joined with secular movements to overthrow the Shah.  

In 1966, Ne Win seized power from U Nu in Burma.
“Soldiers ruled Burma as soldiers.”
Ne Win thought that western political
Institutions “encouraged divisions.”
Minority groups found foreign support for their separatist goals.
The Karens and the Mons supported U Nu in Bangkok.  


Rare copper, a heavy metal, no alloys,
a rock in groundwater,
conducts electricity and heat.
In 1965, my Dad’s cousin met him at Heathrow, gave him a coat and £10 and brought him to a bed and breakfast across from Charing Cross Station where he’d get the train to Sheffield the next morning.
He took the train and someone met him at the train station.  
At the interview they asked him to design a grandry girder, the main weight bearing steel girder as a test.
Iron in the inner and outer core of the earth,
He’d designed many of those.  
He was hired and lived at the YMCA for 2 1/2 years.  
He took his mother’s family name, Menon, instead of his father’s, Varma.
In 1967, he left for Canada and interviewed at Bechtel before getting hired at Seagrams.  
Iron enables blood to carry oxygen.
His boss recommended him for Dale Carnegie’s leadership training classes and my dad joined the National Instrument Society and became President.
He designed a still In Jamaica,
Ordered all the parts, nuts and bolts,
Had all the parts shipped to Jamaica and made sure they got there.
His boss supervised the construction, installation and commission in Jamaica.
Quartz, heat and fade resistant, though he was an engineer and did the work of an engineer, my dad only had the title, technician so my dad’s boss thought he wasn’t getting paid enough but couldn’t get his boss to offer more than an extra $100/week or the title of engineer; he told my dad he thought he should leave.
In 1969, he got a job at Celanese, which made rayon.
He quit Celanese to work at McGill University and they allowed him to take classes to earn his MBA while working.  

The United States and Israel’s alliance was strong by 1967.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 at the end of the Third Arab Israeli War didn’t mention the Palestinians but mentioned the refugee problem.
After 1967, the Palestinians weren’t often mentioned and when mentioned only as terrorists.  
Palestinians’ faith in the “American sponsored peace process” diminished, they felt the world community ignored and neglected them also.
Groups like MAN that stopped expecting anything from Arab regimes began hijacking airplanes.
By 1972, the Palestine Liberation Organization had enough international support to get by the United States’ veto in the United Nations Security Council and Arab League recognition as representative of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians knew the United States stated its support, as the British had, but they weren’t able to accomplish anything.  
The force Israel exerted in Johnson’s United States policy delivered no equilibrium for the Palestinians.  

In 1969, all political parties submitted to the BSPP, Burma Socialist Programme Party.
Ne Win nationalized banks and oil and deprived minorities of opportunities.
Ne Win became U Nu Win, civilian leader of Burma in 1972 and stopped the active role that U Nu defined for Burma internationally
He put military people in power even when they didn’t have experience which triggered “maldistribution of goods and chronic shortages.”  
Resources were located in areas where separatist minorities had control.

The British presence in the South China Sea ended in 1968.  
The United States left Vietnam in 1974 and China went into the Western Paracels.
The U.S. didn’t intervene and Vietnam took the Spratlys.
China wanted to claim the continental shelf In the central part of the South China Sea and needed the Spratlys.
The United States mostly disregarded the Ulama In Iran and bewildered the Iranian people by not supporting their revolution.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.


Edelweiss

I laid out in my backyard in my bikini.  
I love the feeling of my body in the sun.  
I’d be dark from the end of spring until winter.
The snow froze my bare feet through winter ,
my skin pale.
American towns in 1984,
Free, below glaciers the sunlight melted the snow,
a sea of green and the edelweiss on the edge of the  limestone,
frosted but still strong.    
When the spring warmed the grass,
the grass warmed my feet. 
The whole field looked cold and white from the glacier but in the meadow,
the bright yellow centers of those flowers float free in the center of the white petals.
The bright yellow center of those edelweiss scared the people my parents ran to America from India to get away from.  
On a sidewalk in Queens, New York in 1991, the men stared and yelled comments at me in short shorts and a fitted top in the summer.  
I grabbed my dad’s arm.

























The Bread and Coconut Butter of Aparigraha

Twelve year old flowerhead,
Marigold, yarrow and nettle,
I’d be all emotion
If not for all my work
From the time I was a teenager.
I got depressed a lot.
I related to people I read about
In my weather balloon,
Grasping, ignorant, and desperate,
But couldn’t relate to other twelve year olds.
After school I read Dali’s autobiography,
Young ****** Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.
Fresh, green nettle with fresh and dried yarrow for purity.
Dead souls enticed to the altar by orange marigolds,
passion and creativity,
Coax sleep and rouse dreams.
Satellites measure indirectly with wave lengths of light.
My weather balloon measures the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere directly,
Fifty thousand feet high,
Metal rod thermometer,
Slide humidity sensor,
Canister for air pressure.

I enjoy rye bread and cold coconut butter in my weather balloon,
But I want Dali, and all the artists and writers.
Rye grows at high altitudes
But papyrus grows in soil and shallow water,
Strips of papyrus pith shucked from their stems.
When an anchor’s weighed, a ship sails,
But when grounded we sail.
Marigolds, yarrow and nettle,
Flowerhead,
I use the marigold for sleep,
The yarrow for endurance and intensity,
toiling for love and truth,
And the nettle for healing.
Strong rye bread needs equally strong flavors.
By the beginning of high school,
I read a lot of Beat literature
And found Buddhism.
I loved what I read
But I didn’t like some things.
I liked attachment.  
I got to the ground.
Mushrooms grow in dry soil.
Attachment to beauty is Buddha activity.
Not being attached to things I don’t find beautiful is Buddha activity.  
I fried mushrooms in a single layer in oil, fleshy.
I roasted mushrooms at high temperatures in the oven, crisp.
I simmered mushrooms in stock with kombu.
Rye bread with cold coconut butter and cremini mushrooms,
raw, soft and firm.  
Life continues, life changes,
Attachments, losses, mourning and suffering,
But change lures growth.
I find stream beds and wet soil.
I lay the strips of papyrus next to each other.
I cross papyrus strips over the first,
Then wet the crossed papyrus strips,
Press and cement them into a sheet.
I hammer it and dry it in the sun,
With no thought of achievement or self,
Flowerhead,
Hands filled with my past,
Head filled with the future,
Dali, artists poets,
Wishes and desires aligned with nature,
Abundance,
Cocoa, caraway, and molasses.

If I ever really like someone,
I’ll be wearing the dress he chooses,
Fresh green nettle and yarrow, the seeds take two years to grow strong,
Lasting love.
Marigolds steer dead souls from the altar to the afterlife,
Antiseptic, healing wounds,
Soothing sore throats and headaches.
Imperturbable, stable flowerhead,
I empty my mind.
When desires are aligned with nature, desire flows.
Papyrus makes paper and cloth.
Papyrus makes sails.
Charcoal from the ash of pulverized papyrus heals wounds.
Without attachment to the fruit of action
There is continuation of life,
Rye bread and melted coconut butter,
The coconut tree in the coconut butter,
The seed comes from the ground out of nothing,
Naturalness.
It has form.
As the seed grows the seed expresses the tree,
The seed expresses the coconut,
The seed expresses the coconut butter.
Rye bread, large open hollows, chambers,
Immersed in melted coconut butter,
Desire for expansion and creation,
No grasping, not desperate.
When the mind is compassion, the mind is boundless.
Every moment,
only that,
Every moment,
a scythe to the papyrus in the stream bed of the past.  

































Sound on Powdery Blue

Potter’s clay, nymph, plum unplumbed, 1993.
Dahlia, ice, powder, musk and rose,
my source of life emerged in darkness, blackness.
Seashell fragments in the sand,
The glass ball of my life cracked inside,
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks,
Nacre kept those cracks from getting worse.
Young ****** Autosodomized By Her Own Chastity,
Nymph, I didn’t want to give my body,
Torn, *****, ballgown,
To people who wouldn’t understand me,
Piquant.

Outside on the salt flats,
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, pleasure and fertility and
Asexual Artemis, goddess of animals, and the hunt,
Mistress of nymphs,
Punish with ruthless savagery.

In my bedroom, blue caribou moss covered rocks, pine, and yew trees,
The heartwood writhes as hurricane gales, twisters and whirlwinds
Contort their bark,
Roots strong in the soil.
Orris root dried in the sun, bulbs like wood.
Dahlia runs to baritone soundbath radio waves.
Light has frequencies,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet,
Flame, slate and flint.
Every night is cold.

Torii gates, pain secured as sacred.
An assignation, frost hardy dahlia and a plangent resonant echo.
High frequency sound waves convert to electrical signals,
Breathe from someone I want,
Silt.
Beam, radiate, ensorcel.
I break the bark,
Sap flows and dries,
Resin seals over the tear.
I distill pine,
Resin and oil for turpentine, a solvent.
Quiver, bemired,
I lead sound into my darkness,
Orris butter resin, sweet and warm,
Hot jam drops on snow drops,
Orange ash on smoke,
Balm on lava,
The problem with cotton candy.

Electrical signals give off radiation or light waves,
The narrow frequency range where
The crest of a radio wave and the crest of a light wave overlap,
Infrared.
Glaciers flow, sunlight melts the upper layers of the snow when strong,
A wet snow avalanche,
A torrent, healing.
Brown sugar and whiskey,
Undulant, lavender.
Pine pitch, crystalline, sticky, rich and golden,
And dried pine rosin polishes glass smooth
Like the smell of powdery orris after years.
Softness, flush, worthy/not worthy,
Rich rays thunder,
Intensify my pulse,
Frenzied red,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet.
Babylon—flutter, glow.
Unquenchable cathartic orris.  

















Pink Graphite

Camellias, winter shrubs,
Their shallow roots grow beneath the spongy caribou moss,
Robins egg blue.
After writing a play with my gifted students program in 1991,
I stopped spending all my free time writing short stories,
But the caribou moss was still soft.

In the cold Arctic of that town,
The evergreen protected the camellias from the afternoon sun and storms.
They branded hardy camellias with a brass molded embossing iron;
I had paper and graphite for my pencils.

After my ninth grade honors English teacher asked us to write poems in 1994,
It began raining.
We lived on an overhang.
A vertical rise to the top of the rock.
The rainstorm caused a metamorphic change in the snowpack,
A wet snow avalanche drifted slowly down the moss covered rock,
The snow already destabilized by exposure to the sunlight.

The avalanche formed lakes,
rock basins washed away with rainwater and melted snow,
Streams dammed by the rocks.  
My pencils washed away in the avalanche,
My clothes heavy and cold.
I wove one side of each warp fiber through the eye of the needle and one side through each slot,
Salves, ointments, serums and tinctures.
I was mining for graphite.
They were mining me,
The only winch, the sound through the water.

A steep staircase to the red Torii gates,
I broke the chains with bells for vespers
And chimes for schisms,
And wove the weft across at right angles to the warp.  

On a rocky ledge at the end of winter,
The pink moon, bitters and body butter,
They tried to get  me to want absinthe,
Wormwood for bitterness and regret.
Heat and pressure formed carbon for flakes of graphite.
Heat and pressure,
I made bitters,
Brandy, grapefruit, chocolate, mandarin rind, tamarind and sugar.
I grounded my feet in the pink moss,
paper dried in one hand,
and graphite for my pencils in the other.  



































Flakes

I don’t let people that put me down be part of my life.  
Gardens and trees,
My shadow sunk in the grass in my yard
As I ate bread, turmeric and lemon.
Carbon crystallizes into graphite flakes.
I write to see well,
Graphite on paper.  
A shadow on rock tiles with a shield, a diamond and a bell
Had me ***** to humiliate me.
Though I don’t let people that put me down near me,
A lot of people putting me down seemed like they were following me,
A platform to jump from
While she had her temple.  

There was a pink door to the platform.
I ate bread with caramelized crusts and
Drank turmeric lemonade
Before I opened that door,
Jumped and
Descended into blankets and feathers.
I found matches and rosin
For turpentine to clean,
Dried plums and licorice.  

In the temple,
In diamonds, leather, wool and silk,
She had her shield and bells,
Drugs and technology,
Thermovision 210 and Minox,
And an offering box where people believed
That if their coins went in
Their wishes would come true.

Hollyhock and smudging charcoal for work,  
Belled,
I ground grain in the mill for the bread I baked for breakfast.
The bells are now communal bells
With a watchtower and a prison,
Her shield, a blowtorch and flux,
Her ex rays, my makeshift records
Because Stalin didn’t like people dancing,
He liked them divebombing.
Impurities in the carbon prevent diamonds from forming,
Measured,
The most hard, the most expensive,
But graphite’s soft delocalized electrons move.  






































OCEAN BED

The loneliness of going to sleep by myself.  
I want a bed that’s high off the ground,
a mattress, an ocean.
I want a crush and that  person in my bed.  
Only that,
a crush in my bed,
an ocean in my bed.  
Just love.  
But I sleep with my thumbs sealed.  
I sleep with my hands, palms up.  
I sleep with my hands at my heart.  
They sear my compassion with their noise.  
They hold their iron over their fire and try to carve their noise into my love,
scored by the violence of voices, dark and lurid,  
but not burned.  
I want a man in my bed.  
When I wake up in an earthquake
I want to be held through the aftershocks.  
I like men,
the waves come in and go out
but the ocean was part of my every day.  
I don’t mind being fetishized in the ocean.  
I ran by the ocean every morning.  
I surfed in the ocean.  
I should’ve gone into the ocean that afternoon at Trestles,
holding my water jugs, kneeling at the edge.  














Morning

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  

Morning—the molten lava in the outer core of the earth embeds the iron from the inner core into the earth’s magnetic field.  
The magnetic field flips.  
The sun, so strong, where it gets through the trees it burns everything but the pine.  
The winds change direction.  
Storms cast lightening and rain.  
Iron conducts solar flares and the heavy wind.  
In that pine forest, I shudder every time I see a speck of light for fear of neon and fluorescents.  The eucalyptus cleanses congestion.  
And Kerouac’s stream ululates, crystal bowl sound baths.  
I follow the sound to the water.  
The stream ends at a bluff with a thin rocky beach below.  
The green water turns black not far from the shore.  
Before diving into the ocean, I eat globe mallow from the trees, stems and leaves, the viscous flesh, red, soft and nutty.  
I distill the pine from one of the tree’s bark and smudge the charcoal over my skin.  

Death, the palo santo’s lit, cleansing negative energy.  
It’s been so long since I’ve smelled a man, woodsmoke, citrus and tobacco.  
Jasmine, plum, lime and tuberose oil on the base of my neck comforts.  
Parabolic chambers heal, sound waves through water travel four times faster.  
The sound of the open sea recalibrates.  
I dissolve into the midnight blue of the ocean.  

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  
I want hot water with coconut oil when I get up.  
We’d lay out on the lawn, surrounded by high trees that block the wind.  
Embers flying through the air won’t land in my yard, on my grass, or near my trees.  





Blue Paper

Haze scatters blue light on a planet.  
Frought women, livid, made into peonies by Aphrodites that caught their men flirting and blamed the women, flushed red.
and blamed the women, flushed red.
Frought women, livid, chrysanthemums, dimmed until the end of the season, exchanged and retained like property.  
Blue women enter along the sides of her red Torii gates, belayed, branded and belled, a plangent sound.  
By candles, colored lights and dried flowers she’s sitting inside on a concrete floor, punctures and ruin burnished with paper, making burnt lime from lime mortar.  
Glass ***** on the ceiling, she moves the beads of a Palestinian glass bead bracelet she holds in her hands.  
She bends light to make shadows against  thin wooden slats curbed along the wall, and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she makes tinctures, juniper berries and cotton *****.
Loamy soil in the center of the room,
A hawthorn tree stands alone,
A gateway for fairies.
large stones at the base protecting,
It’s branches a barrier.  
It’s leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
It’s berries, red skin and yellow flesh, make jam.
Green bamboo stakes for the peonies when they whither from the weight of their petals.
And lime in the soil.  
She adds wood chips to the burnt lime in the kiln,
Unrolled paper, spools, and wire hanging.
Wood prayer beads connect her to the earth,
The tassels on the end of the beads connect her to spirit, to higher truth.
Minerals, marine mud and warm basins of seawater on a flower covered desk.  
She adds slaked lime to the burnt lime and wood chips.  
The lime converts to paper,
Trauma victims speak,
Light through butterfly wings.  
She’s plumeria with curved petals, thick, holding water

It grew through him
violently,
relentlessly.
Vines and thorns
weaving throughout his
entirety.
Is this what happens
when pride grasps the heart
and punctures the brain?
He touched with force -
bruised and slit.
turned kisses into slaps,
love to sin.
Stood inches taller,
vines lengthening his limbs.
crawling up his spine,
weaving into his skin.
He finally agreed
with his family:
I wasn't good enough for him.
Pride was like
an infestation.
a twisting ****,
an infection.

The weak inherit the Earth
The meek inherit their lead
Unaware of their life's worth
Until after they're dead

We are hopelessly trampled by a bullet stampede
Inflicted upon us for the wealthy man's greed
They sell us death as a commodity
While we can only mourn solemnly

They are arms dealers
We are harm feelers
They are life stealers
When we can't find healers
For the fatal wounds that end our lives so abruptly
And the man with the gun has no need to trust me
He has placed his faith in Ares
His humanity he failed to carry
He sold it urgently to feel secure
But then his thoughts became impure
For whatever reason he cast a death sentence
He felt injustice and wanted to get vengeance
But to the merchants of wrath
He is just math
Numbers on a graph
They must minimize
With blatant lies

Businessmen will try to create a need for their product
But engendering fear for profit seems like misconduct
Because as the bullets are raining
And the militants are training
Their money is stacking
While terrorists are attacking
Their nature seems callous
When they rely on our malice
They see us as a body count
They see us as simple trout
Swimming upstream to die
So they can eat us
Convincing us we'll fly
With minds of a fetus

The bullet burns as it punctures our civilization
It fuels our bitter spiteful incubation
We sit in the chamber
As they utilize our anger
The rich get richer
We don't see the picture
When gunshots scatter crowds
And the echoes scatter our thoughts
They want the volume to be loud
So we'll forget what we're taught
That our lives are the price of a gun and a bullet
Our paranoid lives become hard to live to the fullest

On this tan cutting board
You earn your corrupted name:
“Alligator pear.”

The serrated blade
Punctures your hide—a balloon
Under a pin’s pressure,

Shades of green furling out.
I’m sure you’d prefer
Vegetable status if you developed

Self-awareness; or maybe
You’d withdraw from knowledge
Of the human type.

I trust my cooking songs—
Slowdive and Chaka Khan—
Can’t hurt you anymore

Than your predestined obliteration;
Mastication via your domesticators:
It all ends in fertilizer.

(Where you began!)

O, avocado, phantom “fruit”
Born of the self-same Life Source,
Schopenhauer’s Will,

My transient enjoyment of you
Within this vegetable salad—
An Achaean enclosed by Trojan blades—

Suffices for a life of sanctity.

They walk beside me
                                      always late for something.
                                         Quickening loafers
                                   compete against themselves        
                                  emphasising their importance.    
                                                       Go!
                                       Choking on their breath
                          in an over-zealous attempt to identify
                                             What's freedom?

                                          This fastened reality
                                         Punctures inner peace
                                          my energy disperses
                       Like a balloon buzzing as it loses momentum.
                              When did Life become a marathon?
                            When will I decide where I want to be?
                                  
                         ­         Conversations shout themselves out..
                  an energetic argument before their words reach the air..
                          Will you ever confront your disguised pains?
                                            My mind's elsewhere..
                                           I'm trying to figure out
                         the last time I saw your body unclench itself.
                                    
                           ­                 And i'm a little confused,  
                         because I don't know whether to accept your denial
                                                          ­        or
                                    continue to disconnect from reality.  
                                                     And I question,
           If we all mirror eachother, what part of myself cannot find peace in you?

                                      
                   ­                      I observe this anxiety in motion
                                               stuck forever in a hurry
                       leading itself down roads that end where they began.
                                                  And I wonder,
                                           If their legs were to rest
                  would they have to pick their head up from the floor?

                                         
              ­                             Like buddhas in a city,
                               their lives are a fast forwarded tomorrow
                                       as the present hurries along.        
                                                   And I ponder,
                   Does the truth stop blinding when silence doesn't teach?

                                             A quickening motion             
                                         Changing with every step.
                                                   Acceleration..
                                                 human race...
                                                       ­ Go! 
                                            Chasing of thy death..

The men kept to themselves:
they were waiting for the swiftness of the last cyclists.
The women kept to themselves:
they were expecting the death of a boy on a Japanese schooner.
They all kepy to themselves-
dreaming of the open beaks of dying birds,
the sharp parasol that punctures
a recently flattened toad,
beneath silence with a thousand ears
and tiny mouths of water
in the canyons that resist
the violent attack on the moon.
The boy on the schooner was crying and hearts were breaking
in anguish for the witness and vigilance of all things,
and because of the sky blue ground of black footprints,
obscure names, saliva, and chrome radios were still crying.
It doesn't matter if the boy grows silent when stuck with the last pin,
or if the breeze is defeated in cupped cotton flowers,
because there is a world of death whose perpetual sailors will appear in the arches and
freeze you from behind the trees.
it's useless to look for the bend
where night loses its way
and to wait in ambush for a silence that has no
torn clothes, no shells, and no tears,
because even the tiny banquet of a spider
is enough to upset the entire equilibrium of the sky.
There is no cure for the moaning from a Japanese schooner,
nor for those shadowy people who stumble on the curbs.
The countryside bites its own tail in order to gather a bunch of roots
and a ball of yarn looks anxiously in the grass for unrealized longitude.
The Moon! The police. The foghorns of the ocean liners!
Facades of *****, of smoke, anemones, rubber gloves.
Everything is shattered in the night
that spread its legs on the terraces.
Everything is shatter in the tepid faucets
of a terrible silent fountain.
Oh, crowds! Loose women! Soldiers!
We will have to journey through the eyes of idiots,
open country where the docile cobras, coiled like wire, hiss,
landscapes full of graves that yield the freshest apples,
so that uncontrollable light will arrive
to frighten the rich behind their magnifying glasses-
the odor of a single corpse from the double source of lily and rat-
and so that fire will consume those crowds still able to **** around a moan
or on the crystals in which each inimitable wave is understood.

pieces of flotsam
soak and float on the paper,
jetsam thrown to lighten
the load,
or goad,
the alligator, away
the guttural noises, sound like harsh
commentary the closer the
gator
is allowed to get,
not wanting to look over the shoulder,
but stop in for biting remarks,
the gator's teeth are so large and famous
they have names and voices;
"punctuation or punctures, I can help"

"point of view tch, tch, tch"
                                                            ­            
"your grammar needs work"

"doubt you will finish"

"no one will read IT"

"you will never find the right word"

"is your audience a six year old"

"borrrrring"

"what a croc"

"are you enjoying what you are doing?"

"successful writers are all published"

"you call that a sentence, keep it up and it will be a death sentence "

"how many tenses can you misuse in a paragraph"

and these are the names of some of the smaller teeth,
the molars, are more than a mouthful,
have polar names, that would leave anyone cold,
                                                      even the bold,
and shall not be put in print,
they bring out the PTSD,
imprinted for eternity, by
the gator which
comes at the sounds
of splashing, flailing, and failing,
as the pounding of the heart,
the deepened breathing,
as the ink from
the pen, unfiltered,
leaves nerves and veins exposed,
while leaving to find home, a safe haven, a storybook ending,
away from the gator's keen sense of
overt criticism, intended to gut,
and eviscerate, cutting remarks,
putdowns to hold down and under,
the piece that IT is trying to tear off
while spinning or shaking the head
side to side, which is both NO!
and to bash the will, the self-esteem, into little pieces
of me...
            and my worst enemy,
                                                my internal, infernal editor,
                                                         ­                                     with the voracious appetite for self-def**eating

A huge centipede crawls across the floor
He is black
and his legs are orange.
He is enormous
12 inches
Maybe more

And he rears back and attacks the feet of the passers-by
And they smile and reach down and pat him.
They smile.
And he bites their hands.

Their hands swell up around the two deep punctures,
which are swollen up over, the only sign left being two tiny oozing wrinkles.
The purple hands are polka dotted with yellow and dying veins.
They admire the plethora of color that is now their hand.
From the pain they lust for more and more pain and more and more pain.

They rise from their overstuffed red sofas to the middle of the floor and trade blows.
A girl of twenty with black curly locks falls to the ground with a wet thud
and summons the centipede who bites her in the cheek, piercing the paper thin flesh.

He gets a strong hold on her face and drags her across the floor.
She giggles in delight!
The centipede rips her limb from limb and
She giggles in delight!

Another wet thud.
She had a puffy purple companion in a moment as the centipede drags to her a young man of twenty-one.
Fate!
Their lips meet
and their saliva, thick and curdled mixes.
They giggle in delight!
As the centipede rips them limb from limb.
You look like you're losing weight!
The centipede is finding it.

He eats all but their skulls,
shining in a thin layer of blood,
picked clean of flesh
Locked in a sweet embrace of phantom lips
Until a pugilist twitches his leg in an awkward defensive maneuver and sends the girl's skull spinning across the floor
until it hits against a white wall with a crack
and it splits.

Party-goers begin to trip over the centipede.
And with every wet thud on the floor
another skull is left to be an obstacle for fluid movement.
The centipede has to coil up to be able to fit in the room.

And soon there is one pugilist left
And he scratches the centipede's shiny black metallic and spackled red back with a mangled mass of knuckle
and yellow poisoned veins.
The centipede rears back
But falls back on itself out of its own sheer weight
and its back snaps,
spraying the finalist with a mix of entrails of bug and human kind.

I do believe
Tonight, more than all others
The distance pierces my soul
A deeper depth
For each mile apart
A thousand punctures through
Still, after the red gums black
What is left
To course through my emptied veins
Is nought but you
The very life within me
The very beat of my heart
Your sweet breath
My only air
'Tis love that bridges the distance
But pain flows in rapids beneath
With you souls soar with angels
Anticipation of your return
Leads each day
As my smile is painted
With the memory of your own
Traversing the bridge
A tricky feat on stormy nights
The rain sparkles like diamonds
The moonlight never more beautiful
As in their reflection
Feeding the river
Yet, somehow, fortifying the bridge
Love is rooted deeply
Bound in eternal light
To a world tinged in darkness
A beacon within
Home is always in sight
If just out of reach
With eyes closed in slumber
United in bliss
Wrapped in the last time
Living for the next time
As much as it can be called living
Being stabbed by each
Of a thousand miles

Users and abusers
come one and all
there is a freak show
down in the glass house
winos and crack heads
coke freaks and nitrous suckers
acupuncture skin punctures
and candy land pill poppers
*** heads and shroom munchers
users and abusers
one and all
come on down to church
in the basement of the glass house
wet your tongue in holy water
and revel the gospel of our lord and savior
(Insert dead pop culture icon here)
and don't forget to pay the tithe
to mother superior

my neighbour came over,
quick impromptu
into the dog collar
and you have your murderer
and the priest;
guilt ridden as if by small pox
she sat on my bed:
no ulterior motive,
no auxiliaries of conscience to back-up
now; a clear would-be **** victim...
jewish so i had to stress my fascination
with the jewish mysticism of kabbalah;
and i did so in all earnest
asking whether i said i am eh yeh correctly:
also the whole bit of original interpretation
the secrecy of the rabbinical
aHa                    aHe              
males as rigid as consonants
women as fluid as vowels *******
missing accents on eden's language of globalization
that's short of tartan english of glasgow
with key stress punctures of trans-punctuation
crafted for either serious distinction on consonants,
or ridiculous aesthetics when given to vowels
of parisian stilettos: fancy ah fancy nah fancy
a mistress in fishnet leggings? yes? no? maybe?
undecided i see. trophy wife material... next!

Ring, why? Significant...
Maybe. Serpentine, constricting

Polished neatly...not really
Worn by arguments tarnished

Smooth contact, rough punctures
Green stains of hurt bury deep

“promise me” was written
Only “not today” is screamed

Ring, why? Accepting apologies
Too late to return a gesture made

Hollowed now, diamonds forever?
Maybe. Should of thought

Commitment tomorrow
Tonight is dry, this ring, why?

You articulate in swift flight, confidence soaring,
plenitude of words, justly convincing.
Floating on breathless wind between here and there.
Fumbling with sense, coherence of purpose
between twisted bed sheets, whispering pillows;
In the freeze frame static of moonless nights.

I feel the yearning burn towards hoping truth
in a splintering fire against which I warm;
crackling up all your feathers, and concord.
In the daylight you scatter ordinance together,
recklessly aspiring to repair undoing damage:
Wings stunted irrevocably through flailing flighted dreams.

Unknown weighted obstacles glide courageously in hurtled silence,
sideways across the cool air of this post-nested room;
Waiting for gold and diamonds to appear, glorified.
The slightest movement uttered punctures you,
a soggy blown balloon squirting off these walls-
dexterity lays useless on this love-laden floor.

I stare at you spewed inanimately,
like splattered spaghetti in a fitting rage,
across the boards of our echoing abode.
Depths of sightlessness reveal tentatively:
There exists no place for a soul
on the unstable face of the dead.

you can do ever so little, and ever so much,
of what's worth in life, and still leave this world
a paced
              defunct of woman -
undernourished
                              scraping
along into old age with
deviating ideals that were never
there -
             happy are those who die
young, happiest of all are those prescribing
wisdom having only lived the belittling
set years, and
                       happiest
equating subjectivity with pessimism:
     the heaviest of tolls, craving the life
less lived, but otherwise engaging in a fulfilling life,
of that which is assured a comparison:
                                          ultimatum: live...
      the 11th commandment:
                       you shall live...
which debunks all the other alternatives,
as: well, a bit of anything can give you a bit of both;
hence beauty and the untouchables -
                     hence the concept of money
and chisel gold and readied stone -
           if ever a trans-valuation of things, then there...
and only there... terra limbo -
                    whereby xenophobia reaches
the approach en masse - and isn't skin deep,
but a soul's depth, when the answer is assimilated -
when the skin attacked rejoices with jazz
and blues... what can the embedded attack provision
to answer with? i suppose poetry,
the silent homicide - a cancerous growth -
or the rekindled pyramid, medicinal cataract -
because when the skin tone is attacked,
the soul recuperates and answers with glorification;
but when hue and hue match versus...
there's little to answer with... you just simply reply:
you sick *******... i hope your mother dies a painful
death. Pontius Pilate said as much...
and you keep repeating that phrase into what people
know best about aspiring to individual proclamation:
bat i disciplina! they know nothing more,
the west can glorify preaching individuality -
but look how many lives are at stake when the realisation comes
back and says: it was a shambles...
we failed... we only achieved a revenue of investing
in a Mozart under dictators... all we're getting
is a throng of amateurs! we will never get uniqueness
among men when we treat all men as being unique -
most plumbers are content with being simply plumbers,
if you rule them by the anticipatory suggestion of
being poets... a. you won't get any poets,
and b. you won't get any plumbers!
                     i'm writing from experience,
and you know what that does to your argument:
it doubles-up reducing the "intelligent" person to your
level of expertise - tease, not ties -
                                        i wish i could return to my
former level of health,
                              as a roofer -
                                   i'd give each and every one of these
poems the rite of passage of being ethnically clotting
              tomorrow - and simply eradicate them like vermin;
i swear to god, i would... which is why all my agony lies
within saying: but your society got robbed off
a competent construction worker, or a chemist..
but you did't want a poet... because you wanted some
middle-class shanty of a woman to provision Wren's
enterprise...
                       good luck, or Sanskrit 卐.

Dear God,

Do you want me to be grateful
for the way the clouds curl around each other
like ringlets falling from a hairband?
Because I will be, if you want.
And if I tell you the truth
I think I’m going to have to be
because I can’t find any other thing so beautiful.
I’m looking at the world through a view-finder
and I can’t find much that’s pretty these days.

My calf is pressed against the calf of a girl
who I considered for years to be a best friend of mine.
She felt empty
and so she inflated herself with
hot air and “banter” with no meaning.
“***** Please” and “Ohmygod” and “*******”
spew from her awkward, Christian mouth
and I wonder whether she scooped her insides out
like pumpkin flesh
and inserted somebody new there in her place
like a candle in a jack'o'lantern.
Somebody who doesn’t have the time for me.
So I give up on our small talk
and decide not to interrupt her mobile phone;
I feel the back of her head like a headache.

“Mum’s sweated off four-hundred-and-seventy-six calories today”
she tells me and I ask her how she knows.
“She’s a got a tag thingy, you know. I have too.”

I can’t bear the sound of calories.
They are nails on all my chalkboards
and they are the wrong-footed *****
that tolls in church.

I lower my gaze to the absent-minded mother
whose fingers climb into her pram
to draw circles on the baby’s scalp.
She stirs my thoughts with them.
I think I’ve come a long way since
I started this prayer,
since my eyes hit the clouds.

Someone once told me that the thing he hated above all else
was greed
because greed is a bonfire that hungers without ever feeling full.
And who reminded me that
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We got the greed we hungered for.

And it corrupted us absolutely.

For it is by greed that the ice caps
are sweating off more calories
than the girls in their gym shorts.

It is by greed that they cannot rest
until they have peeled their thighs far enough apart
and by greed that they’ve been lured into the propaganda store
to buy themselves diets.

It is by greed that we cannot look our world in the eye
and greed that necessitates the use of a microscope lens
to distance us from the damage we cause.

It is by greed that we underline the little problems
to cover up the big ones
and it is greed that enables us to find offense in the weather forecast.

It is greed that has shrunk my values into a cage of bitter ribs
and greed that provoked my self-righteous verbal slaughter
of that friend I no longer know.

It is by greed that we started deciding that land belonged to people –
that finders were keepers, as long as they were white –
instead of the earth it consists of.

It is by greed that we doggedly avoid breaking our routines apart
to fit other factors into them.

It is by greed that righteousness
and ******
fall into step
on the path towards a religion that God can’t condone.

It is by greed that fascism and communism
eclipse one another and meld into one.

It is by greed that the old woman opposite
refuses to share her seat or even her smile
with a human under the age of thirty.

It is by greed that kids have bullets in them
and mothers are shot full of infection
and the water runs dry
through the dripping tap we didn’t fix in our bathroom.

It is by greed that I sit on a bus
and shift my problem onto our backs
with my view-finder.

And yeah,
I still see some beauty when I look for it
but I see beauty like a picture postcard
that an angry kid took a hole punch to.
It got so torn up but we refuse to put it under a light
in order to avoid seeing just how many gaps we’ve made.
Recently I’ve noticed this postcard’s
got too many holes in it to be able to see
what the picture once was.
There’s more absent than present
and, sure, we’ve still got our itty-bitty blue-sky-days
between the punctures,
but the grime and the guilt seeps out
like the air we drove our dreams on.

What a mess we inflicted, I think.

There’s a ceiling light in our toilet that attracts flies to it.
They fly in and burn up
and the lamp bowl fills with insect corpses
until you can’t see through them anymore.
We’re like that.
Flies go suicide bombing
and ***** things up
with the clutter they leave behind them.
Meanwhile,
as long as the dead stay in their graves,
they don’t bother the rest.
We look up at the ceiling
and don’t change the lightbulb.

How many people does it take to change a lightbulb?

We like looking at our world from the atmosphere;
we observe it from the internet,
believing that we stand on the moon,
too far away to touch the gashes we’ve torn.
We don’t like looking at the way the blood runs;
we tuck it under our fingernails instead
and hope no one holds us accountable.

When I come home I snap at my mum
because I am so struck by the brokenness of what I’m dealing with
that I cannot have her ask me how my day was.
Because I cannot complain about the weather
but I need to
because our family conversation is not big enough
to grapple with the magnitude of the genuine complaints I have.
Because I cannot simply tell her that I hate America
or feel comfortable praying her this prayer.
So I tell her “OK” and she rolls her eyes at the kettle.

So I’ve got my dish-cloth heart
and the rain starts to spit at us
with tears that are heavy enough to weep the things I can’t shed.

Wash me clean, rain… heaven… God,
because most people put ***** dishcloths in the bin
not the washing machine.

Bass rattles the roofing of the warehouse
Tonight we are truly alive
The alcohol and synthetic drugs course through our blood
Three people stuffed in a cubicle
Snorting lines of coke and adderall from the screen of a smartphone
A truly modern menagerie
The image of a woman confined to my mind
Searching desperately though eternal chasms
Tunnel vision and weary eyes
I don't know when the nights end
or begin
It's a psychosis that developed within me many years previous
The product of a generation with no forethought
Each pill popped was one less worry of the future
Synapses destroyed with such nonchalance
Enjoy the looming sadness

We, doomed to repeat
You, doomed to relive

Each shot to the arm takes it's toll
The toll may not be obvious now but in your twilight...
The wrinkles shall show and the scars continue to glow,
punctures in your flesh allow me to know.

I saw your mind decay before my eyes
Your body emaciated, your legs so fragile
I wish you hadn't experienced life to such a degree
I wish you had stopped me.

But alas, I stand here with my company
Another line
Another
One more
Level the score
One more pill and another tab
One more drag before I pass it back

To replicate my Mother and my father.

My professor tells me-
"You have to be a strong individual."
I arm myself, I fight my demons,
I strive for the dignity and worth of individuals,
I can stand strong
Because I draw my strength from you.

Weighed down by social realities and unjust inequities,
Angered at the politics of life,
I lie in anguish and sorrow
And in my sense of incapability and numbness,
I think of you.
You, who cries with me and makes me smile,
You raise me back to living
Because you believe in me.

When I choose to talk philosophy,
And struggle to articulate my confusions,
I can stand
Because I know you don't judge me.

I see a little girl, bathed in dirt,
Her only toy a stick picked from the gutter,
And I break a little inside
At what is, and what ought to be.
When I'll eventually be convinced to take up a role
In such games of power,
I know you will be there to keep me tied to sanity.

When I lose my faith in human goodness,
Eclipsed by the hunger of men and women,
You take my hand and make me believe
In the beauty of art, of language,
Of music that punctures the soul and soothes the hurt.
In a world that understands only violence and *******,
You show me friendship and compassion.

You could say it’s impossible to isolate oneself from the world.
You’re right.
But let not the whole annihilate the part,
Let not the universe overcome the soul.
When I begin to feel small and insignificant before the magnitude of life’s challenges and wonders,
You remind me of who I am.

We, who must share our lives with millions of others,
Let’s make our lives our own.
Why should the world bind us?
Why should life find us
Waiting for the world to change?
Let’s not sit through as the movie of our lives plays in the background.
With you by my side,
I can say loud and clear:
Come, let us stand strong together.

It is inevitable that
there comes a time
in everyone’s life
that they must
endure a hardship.
The strong and successful
take this hard-ship
and turn themselves
into somewhat
of a Captain Hook,
basically taking the role as
the only person that can
guide their boat
out of the storm.
Similar to roaming
the oceans for weeks,
there comes days
where unexpected blocks
attempt to take a
stab at our vessels.
Science tells us that
with punctures to
our arteries we bleed out.
Use this vital fluid,
mix it with the
very drops of tears
that shed from your baby blues,
and construct a potion.
Witches use this
technique for self pleasure,
which is probably
what you should do.
If anyone tries to
hurt you again
then slip in a
sip of your produced toxic tonic.
Rebuild your barriers
and do not allow anyone
to break it down until you have
total trust in them.
There will come
a day much like
1989 for Berlin,
where the process for
dismantling your wall
will come to pass.
Until then just
never forget the
small things in life
that make you who
you are.
I have this power
that allows me to
look into the
future and witness
someone’s fate.
All I can tell you
is that you can be the director.
If you were in a movie right now,
you would be near the
end of the first cinema.
Let’s call it The Dark Night.
Don’t forget that with
every questionable
ending comes a sequel,
and I promise that
you will
Rise.

White Asylum

I love red!
Wanna know why?
Come on, I think you know!
I’ll help you out!

The
runny then crusty,
gushing then sealed,
but always
thick,
oozing,
smooth
kind of red is my favorite.

Can you figure it out yet?

That red that only flows with punctures,
but then cannot stop.
At least for a while.
Sometimes it cascades
like
     a
       waterfall.
Sometimes a soft trickle
like
a
calm
stream.

But, sadly,
overtime,
just like an artist with his paint,
it gets dry and flaky.

Now you know what I’m talking about!
I’m positive!

Haha yes, I know I’ve gone mad.
I love it.
Embrace it with my entire being!

I think thats why I'm here.

I never get to see red anymore.
They keep me locked away in these
padded
bleached
blinding          
white
walls.

Surrounded by plain.

I really do miss the color red.
i used to see so much of it.
It was a masterpiece.
And I was the mysterious maestro.

Until someone ratted me out!
Not so anonymous anymore!
Gotta tell everybody!
Hmmm, shoulda turned them red too.
Didn't have the time……

Why are you still there?
Have I not made you insane yet?
Good luck sleeping tonight.
Don’t close both eyes.
Thats when I visit.
I make sure you are not looking.
Before you leave and never see your life again.
Sadly, I’m in here.
And you are out there.
Not so many white walls where you are.
Do me a favor, will you?
See some red tonight.
I have lost count of how many days since my last masterpiece.
I really do miss it….


Anyway!
This has been the most pleasant of visits!
Please come again!
Just one thing to remember:
Don’t close both eyes.
That’s when I come.


And I won’t let you go like last time.

All the public pedestrians on main street
See, a business man walking with
A brief case meant for holding important things
They see me and I know they think, that this man has it goin’ on
His paycheck is more than I’ll ever see
And I bet a perfect life fits easily in that brief case
It’s not the case
Let’s get under the skin with injections
To see that
This man is an addict
I’m addicted to I Miss You

Slowly scratching skin
Gradually getting faster
Like I can wipe away her breath with drugs
Picks scabs off arms like memories
But they bleed and run
Reminding me how worse things get when
I try to help
Try to help the addict, I’m an addict

Look at this syringe and call it her kiss
Punctures skin and inject into veins
All the things that made me better than
What I used to be
What he used to be is when he’s high
And the worlds alright
The worlds alright, for as long as this trip lasts
I’m an addict I’m an addict
I’m addicted to I Miss You

I’m addicted to one thing
Trip LSD then move to ecstasy
Snort ******* and swallow some pills
Because they all lead to one thing
Getting high and remember being with her
Sometimes I can hallucinate so hard
That’s she breathing right next to me
See her moving in a black dress
Holding hands for dancing
1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4
I don’t count or dance anymore because I forgot how
Forgot how her heart beat
This is what I do to see her again
I’m addicted to her voice
I’m addicted I’m addicted to
her name
Could even be a drug
It’s like her first letter is a hit and I breathe
Out the last four letters through smoke

Bongs, pipes, syringes and blunts
Drug paraphernalia turns into vehicles
That all take me to the same place
A small town called Human
Because that’s all I want to be
And there’s a city to the North called Reality
They get mixed up sometimes and it’s tough to find work up there
High is the town I visit the most  
But often times I feel like I don’t belong there
And the big city of Over Dose is just a few miles away
Sometimes you get lost looking for Human and Reality that you end up there
Because the directions on the map aren’t finished
The map maker shot himself when he realized God wasn’t hearing him
God moved to a town called I Miss You
I’m addicted
And the last time I checked his next-door neighbor was you
I really want to go to I Miss You and see you but I haven’t been there yet
So wait for me

I’m done visiting these places
High would be a nice vacation spot but I can’t be there all the time
I swear Over Dose could be enough to **** me
I haven’t found I Miss You yet
And its hard to find a place to live and a job in Reality
So, Ima’ take this last hit and hope I can be
Comfortably human

It’s all a matter of time.

this whole time,
was a matter of time.

one after another,
then the next
Look at all the different kinds,
pretty in their way.
It’s almost interesting.
until it’s all the same
It’s all the same.
It’s all the same.
monotony takes hold

Hold it tightly.

it punctures through
My Beautiful Brain
as the sand falls listless
I stand and wonder,
what am I losing?
Nothing important I hope
just my time, apparently endless

The crow sings of what was and shall be
The crow sings of fear and fright
Come! To my side, gather now children
Its fearful call shan't touch your blessed ears behind this wall
Come! Partake of your lessons. Imbibe of wisdom divine
Seek supernatural sanctuary within these sacred speakings

The ****** prowls, crowding at the door
(They call for sacrifice. Who? Is the Snake worthy?)
Come! Summer thunderstorm, mask the screams of the Snake
(Where is the Priest? Shall he not bear witness?)
A shriek punctures the eve as warm rain washes the blood of their hands

The vulture sings of what was and shall be
The vulture sings of hunger and madness
Come! Fall nay into despair, my innocent few
Bare not its beady eyed gaze but yet bury your sight in me
To the other side I'll gently lead, hand in hand
If only your humble servant I may be

The door shudders violently. The committee calls for blood
(His Word is empty. We are beset and the cycle begins anew.)
Come! Winter snowstorm, hide those tracks of the audacious few
(Where is the Priest? His hollow words won't save him)
A knife in the back. The door slams shut and stills.

This song makes me feel extremely melancholic.
Because well I over think things a lot.
Like the corners in rooms eyes have never laid on.
Or little pieces of your skin that I don't get to kiss
I've finally cleaned my room
I swept all the little specs of you that's been in my carpet for some time now
It still smells like your favorite cigarettes
And there is no point of me airing it out because pretty soon that toxic scent will be all I have left of you
I hope I won't forget you but I've never been good at promising
But then again who could forget you
The words you noted
The times lips touched my neck
Or when our teeth clashed against each other
How could I?
Every now and then I poke myself with the Morrissey pin you gave me while looking for the notes you wrote me
The point punctures the tip of my finger slightly
But I've already bled myself dry trying to forget how your hair smelled
And I've gone blind trying to forget what your skin felt like during the summer near the old school
Winter bites near a frozen stream
I pinched myself but your not just a bad dream

i will live and die alone
the thought stabs me in the
chest

repeatedly

it punctures my jugular
and i bleed out on your carpet

i got too high again