Mr. Hippo, you are 3,000 pounds. How is it that you are able to swim? Tell me, Mr. Hippo. Your legs are so short that your belly drags against the ground. Your head is huge, and your body is intensely round. Yet you are able to stay afloat and not drown. How is it that you are buoyant? And how is it that those stubby legs of yours can propel you forward in water?

Mr. Hippo, I hear you can run up to 30 mph on land. *******. You don’t even need to run. You’re regarded as the most dangerous animal in Africa. I hear you can snap a crocodile in two with one bite. What do you eat, Mr. Hippo, to get that big? I hear you only eat grass and you don’t really fight. Yet you have those giant teeth that lions do not ***** with.

Mr. Hippo, you’re that dangerous and feared, but still in a good enough mood to wiggle your ears. And maintain such shinny Hippo skin. It is for all these reasons that I would like to have you as a pet, Mr. Hippo. I’d walk you down the street and show you off to all the neighbors and let them gossip. You could swim in their pools and feed on their blossoms. You could stop their cars in their tracks and their yards, you could cross them. They will say, “Mr. Antonio, you are strange.” But it will cost them. Because later they will say, “Mr. Antonio, we are sorry. Mr. Hippo, you are awesome.”

If my heart was drawn on paper,
it would never fall apart.

I'd hang it on the refrigerator
like my daughter's works of art.

Though it bends
and crumples over time,
it cannot be erased.

    Where real hearts are heavy,
this one would be weightless
    folding easily into pockets
    like money
for betting
    
    win or loose,
    it unfolds unphased.

This is child-like thinking.

    If my heart was drawn on paper

it would rip, break
I would throw it
in every direction
until it went missing

They'd return it to me
deformed,
no longer the drawing
I made
when we were just kids
K i s s i n g

I'd barely recognize it.

1 2 3 4
I delcare love a war.

So I'll make myself
a new drawing
and let go
of the past.

I'll leave the missing pieces
where they are,
with who I am
intact.

I'll pretend nothing is broken
and that my heart on paper
is meant to last.

This is childish thinking.

Still, I'll pick up the pieces
and start over
as my drawing goes up
in flames I'll rise above

Though the heart on paper
burns to ashes,
in the embers
I'll find new love.

Poets are annoying

When regular people are busy,
they sit and wait to drop
words into the toilet
that'll make you dizzy

They stare at the blank page
the way one stares straight
at the bathroom wall
when taking a
"shhh"
as in, "shut up" and "listen"

the few who stop to do so
won’t be impressed at all
they’ll hear only…sounds
and get headaches, or frowns
they'll choose to forget it

poems are misunderstandings
and the few who dare write them
are nameless turds, wiping
their words onto paper
and calling the stains "art"

my "shhh" is fresh, they'd say
when their breath smells like brain ****

so the moment this poem comes out
I’d like you to throw it in the toilet
and flush it down

ha ha
maybe that’s why poetry
as an art form
stays underground

it stinks
to write what no one will read
or have thoughts no one will think

poets are lonely creatures
locked in stalls with too much ink
not enough toilet paper
and the ironic need to be heard

or worse, to sound cool
with every word-dump they take
only to emerge from their solitude
the way one emerges from the bathroom:
feeling great

Fall.
Run-down places are the nature of things
the decay that the gentrified smile of each city tries to cover up as trains move past them.
The empty strip mall, the mid-nowhere gas station, the vacant lots and bordered windows and all those hollow ruins for lease between the lights of the rented spaces we call home at night
So when you reply with silence as the answer I have no choice but to accept,
I think of an entire ghost town built on the sincerity of those run-down places where no one goes
And I go there, alone
not lonely,
if only to seek the company of the quiet truth that demands no explanation for why she left
or why I returned
to walk down each deserted lane from memory toward what I once called my hometown, my old stomping grounds
I ask if I am okay
with the absence and let the replies
come in echoes against the shell of my former house
carrying the sound of far-off ocean waves
maybe, a Rocky, sandless beach
in the Pacific Northwest
where we'll meet again someday
okay at last with the silence that comes from leaving everything behind and just going.

Rise.
Spring is you
reborn.
a re-learning of steps
needed to stand alone.
Spring is the water
from the sink that hits you between the eyes with the cold, hard fact that love dies
and you live on.
Spring is a face-off
with new realities
a rising to the ocassion as the weight of colder and darker days thaw off bent shoulders under the cleanse of April's first shower.
Spring is baptism.
Your re-newed steps pound the same pavement like falling petals this time around
And you remember, finally,
That you loves you
And you're forgiven when you did not.
You remember where it was you were going today
Spring is hello, good morning
Let's go for a coffee and talk
about what we dreamed
until we wake up
early enough to greet the brightness ahead.

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.