Here ─
In the loquacious silence
Of the white noise in my mind
I knew I wasn't present

My mother was near ─
With her mind withdrawn
Absent to some place
That dated from ages ago

My father would disappear ─
Only to continue being far
Once he was back
Now travelling into the future


And I have gathered a life without
Now
Right
Here

One can say : "Tell us the truth!"
And I long to want to
but how is it best to do ?

I find it residing deep inside
But my ability is lacking to make it come alive

So I cast out examples
that lay alongside
Heavenly meanings
with Earthly ties

Proverbs , riddles , and saying so wise
Make it easier to see and feel the truth that's disguised

Sometimes it hard to separate the truth
Then one must turn into a quizzical sleuth

But for the one that knocks on the door
A new world opens for them to explore

I do not know your name—
only your silhouette
etched in the echo of things I was not given.
Your absence was my alphabet.
I spelled every woman with your ghost.


They loved me.
But I loved you through them.
Your hands behind their voices.
Your eyes haunting their praise.
They were flesh, and I was kneeling.


I made gods of strangers.
I made homes of hunger.


Mother—not mother.
Lover—not lover.
I could not hold the difference.
They all became symbols
and I became a shrinekeeper,
tending lies with tenderness.


Forgive me,
those I touched but never saw.
I was trying to reach through you
and forgot you were not them.
And they were not you.
None of you asked for this altar.


I am dismantling the myth.
I am returning the light.

worlds are collapsing, rising; dictators exhale,
entangle the veins of the world
some ideas preserve salty streets like janitors of the dark
summer keeps the score of perfumed nights
I indulge in the womb of heat
wounds are retreating in sequestered spaces -
the seeds of the future.
there is a chill in the air, dread strikes near and far
light flows like the dance stuck in my bones
everywhere the pulse of time, dreaming

On our way into
Santa Anita one day,
an old man had tipped
over in his wheelchair.
There was a pool of blood
beneath his smooth head.
I was with my Dad.
He was around the same
age as the poor injured man.
I was 12.

Seeing that man, and watching
the blank stares of the apathetic
crowd gathering around the
man, and the blood, and the
fallen wheelchair, I knew that
nobody would win, and the
horses that ran were the luckiest
of us all.