The moves you made against your fear moved me to faith.
I watched through tears as you were saved -
the heroine of your own fairytale
facing nightmares to awaken the beauty they slept on.
You were candle-flame and made darkness your element,
quivering formlessly in all directions, then still
the moment you found your center to be where it burned the most.
You turned pain into a glowing power source.
You were my favorite self-love poem in motion,
one that dates back to 13th century Persia
about mirrors, and how the polisher of which took on the form
of moonlight itself, giving all it has
when no one was watching.
You poured yourself into that night
in a waterfall of polished movement,
shattering glass, dancing your way out of a distorted
reflection in a carnival funhouse of illusions
you were grown enough to see past.
From a distance, I watched you
transcend technique,
bend and shift through countless forms
as if through a kaleidoscope.
You filled my mind's eye.
I saw myself in your mirror,
coming face to face with every side of you
past and present, high-fiving one, embracing another
in celebration of your conquest.
There's a fighting word beyond our known language
for this: masakatsu agastu
or, "true victory is self-victory".
Fight the battles you need to finish.
I'll be waiting at the edge of my seat
until the house lights come on and the show
ends and the audience disappears,
leaving only us
in front of the mirror
you are no longer afraid of.

What if the people in this room were the pages upon which we wrote: documented with our travels, or inscribed with our beliefs. Our stories, once secrets, become legible. We carry them in heart to heart conversations both trivial and deep. We brainstorm, helping each other write the missing parts and next chapters with our actions as much as our words. We read those around us in the quiet company of our thoughts- our dreams- sometimes loosing ourselves in the blank spaces left by those we once loved. We look up briefly from our reading with renewed perspectives, and we move. Our hands both reach for the same pen at once to rewrite the narrative, passing late-night notes to each other if only to keep ourselves woke. We don’t name what we’ve written, but we sign our names at the bottom and call it ours for the time being. We are impermanent. Still, we leave our marks like fingerprints on the pages of each other -  happy thoughts and revision comments color coded in the margins- our own jam session hidden between the lines we stay writing with no idea or expectation of how it will sound in the end. We utter mysteries and we’re misunderstood, simplifying our confusion into basic metaphors or parables, so that those who pick up where we leave off can understand them, or find some common ground; some shared chapter. We borrow pens and finish each others’ sentences as we collapse on the same endings. Our dialogue subsides into unspoken movement: into silent eyes reading. We are campfire surrounded by the stories we stay telling — that without, we'd be left to scratch the indiscernible signs of love on cave walls for only the darkness to forget.

I pictured the faint outline
we would make
on a blank slate.
We never held hands,
though we knew how to hold ourselves
together enough to feel it
when we brushed shoulders.
I began brushing by her
until the canvas gave way to color.
I filled in the blanks in hurried strokes,
the empty places
I pictured finding her in
or the questions she may have been
the answer to.
I began painting madly
on top of our undone outline
with the color of cherry blossoms
in full bloom
falling, the act an art in itself
whether she loves me or not.
We were barely a sketch
that I started without her.
There wasn't enough to see-
only the abstract impression
she left behind and the inspired
energy
that swept
my brush away
as the paint ran out.
I never knew what we were.
I felt what we could have been.

I sit beside myself on mornings like this, one coffee between us. We grab a chair facing the window. I ask, "What is her favorite color?"

A wordless song pours overhead: 'Sophisticated Lady' by Duke Ellington. We barely know her. "In jazz, the solos are the parts you look forward to," I convince myself.

"These things take time," I add. So we wait staring out the window at the road ahead, until the untouched coffee settles to room temperature. We leave it there, head for the door into the rainy December mist.

She shows up hours later, orders an Earl Grey, sits in the same chair. She covers her face with the latest issue of The Stranger, opened to the horoscope.  

"You will fall back in love with yourself." Coffee and rain sound good together, and Seattle knows it. They bring out the clear blue sky within. Or at least that's what I'd tell her.

In the warring states, they called us men of the waves: 'ronin'.
Masterless, we drifted in and out with the tide because we understood the nature of movement was nothing more than 'hi's' and 'byes'. So we wave both: peace.
It was in this freedom that we arrived at the fearlessness of dying.
We completed ourselves: one with our shadows, our hearts as broken compasses,
scars as maps and our souls held as swords to leave the mark of our nameless legends on the pages of history books that tried to forecast our fate. They now call us men 'a dying breed', though it was by facing death as a way of life that we became immortal.
We were light on our feet to the point of buoyancy, for you could not keep a man of the waves down.
You should have seen us in our element.
We pretty much flew.

The smoke stacks that line the waterfront be like giant joints puffing thoughts of her into air embalmed by hundreds of rainy days
That slow burn, against the icy bay and the barges that carry their loads through them
This corner of the world gets six hours of daylight, tops
Greys seared by neon, smoke and clouds and fog produced as one
continuous substance
There's a pleasant blurryness here
floating amid the buoys and the docked ferryboats,
In the way the monorails glide above toward a 1960s dream of the space age through an Amazonian jungle of glass and cranes
in harmony with the clouds sailing overhead
Here is where you go to let off steam deferred, where you ride trains through a kind of dark that arrives early, stays up late
as shadows wander across the gum covered walls of Post Alley
like ghosts made of espresso mist
freed from lit joints protruding from the skyline
to a high beneath starless heaven
Resting into the glow of that harbor
against thoughts of her that cloud the view of the sea.

Raised
in this floating
world, forever
deep.
You can’t drain the ocean

Decidedly from down
south of here
You can’t un-trace the roots.

You can’t lie and say,
“This isn’t where I grew up”
You can’t deny the fruits
of what was planted two generations ago
when your grandpatents arrived from the Philippines, seeds in tow
soil for the taking
You can’t confiscate what they claimed
when they planted their flags
into the moon-white sand of a beach in Florida
on a far side of the planet
their forefarthers have never seen

You can’t say those flags weren’t there
when wind came
You can't ***** out that pride
of country,
cut off its native tongue and its acquired taste, or pass up the plate of fried lumpia and rice passed down from the kitchen of your Daddylol
feeding seven kids day in and out with tomatoes he planted,
chickens he raised, Malonggay leaves he grew
with thumbs so green they wrote in the papers about it
He was a farmer
Your grandmother, a nurse
And i was writer
And this is our story

You can’t erase the letters of your name,
your lineage written all over it
like a map
of everywhere we been
You can’t take back the words in Tagalog and Chavacano
your Lola Shirley must have sang your mother to sleep with
You can’t take their dreams

You can't just wake up one day and undo
the ripple effects their moves
created across waters 10,000 miles east of here,
the rolling waves they curled into
or the faraway shores they washed up upon
Bottled messages in hand
Our legends held within
You can’t say centuries from now that they won’t feel it
when their feet hit the sand of their own frontier
beside the waves we stayed making
a history written in deep water
for those who come after you
to sail above and beyond.