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.  
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.
They both left their homes
before they left for college.  
He went to his father’s house, then college.  He went to work, then 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.

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.
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,
boiling 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 curved along the wall
and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she invents 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,
its branches a barrier.  
Its leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
Its 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.

Gravity employs its ever constant force to manipulate the course of action all over the earth, pinning us down, bitter peals of laughter erupt like molten ash and lava out of her crusty mouth.  Will she take us for a ride this evening?  Spinning us like cognac in a snifter and then she’ll spit us out on the ***** road, putting us out like cigarette butts.  Her mighty weight is distributed amongst all of our shoulders.  But it seems that some loads are less troublesome than others. May I ask why that is?  Don’t kid yourself though.  Before you go revelling in your glory, be aware that we’ve found ways around you, above you.
Gravity distorts my vision and then leaves me groping around, fighting with perception, fighting with focus, fighting with what’s left of time until I finally collapse, defeated, sprawled almost lifeless on the cold tiled floor while you’re still ripping me apart.  
I’d just say that I give up.  I’ve said it millions of times before, but for some reason I’m still here.  I think apathy has replaced the blood and marrow in my body, freezing my soul except for the hours in which all of the infections and deteriorations scare the ******* **** out of me.  I wish I could blame all of this on gravity but it’s really all my fault.  One day I’ll pull gravity down and hold it there for 18 plus years and its screams for mercy will be swallowed whole.  We’ll see whose vision is distorted then.