You spread across the synapses
Resurrecting long buried mind pictures that quickly
Consume the soul in sticky, tar-like drips.
You contained pictures of my mother when she was close to me,
Holding me so she could become closer to what I was.
My mother wrote dates, numbers and letters so she could remember what you were.
You toss memories about like confetti.
Constant reminders of what “is” and what “used to be”.
Fissures between hearts and souls
Leave whimsical marks dancing on mouth corners.
You develop memories that can fill my days with bologna sandwiches and flavored tap water.
While joys of past dissolve, evaporate, & melt away
like the blizzard that was “us”.
So I sit and I stare at you,
An archeological find of what once was
But now is nothing more than heart residue.

I grew into my youth without fearing dinosaurs,
Because I watched too many re-programmings of Jurassic Park.
I wasn't aware that my basketball skills could take me places.
I was born here, I ran through cornfields and tall shades of grass,
playing hooky with *******, hopscotch with ******,
yet still averaging 24.6ppg while playing only 20 minutes a game.
It seemed so easy and simple at first, doing these things.
My neighbor Craig down the street,
used to work at the children's hospital so he always had access to needles;
all he wanted from me was a stack of metal spoons
that I could steal from my grandmother's house so we could dissolve the ******.
“This ****'ll make you feel like you could never die”, he would always say.

It was the 3rd quarter of our high school opening game against Fullerton.
We played at the redeveloped convocation 20 miles south of town,
because our high school received a bomb threat earlier that week.
The court constructed with cheers and boos due to my low field goal percentage.
I stashed my lucky line inside of my practice shorts in the locker room,
so I could lie to my coaches about needing some air.

My nostrils captured the effects of this white powdery substance,
as my body started to fail and deteriorate.
I think I felt my heart stop beating when I came to the free throw line.
First shot...air ball.
Second shot...no shot, body falls to the hardwood.
My shoes squeaked like rabid mice without control,
my right leg became convulsive and spastic, my left moved none.
The floor below my body drenched in a bilinear merging of crimson red and **** yellow.
The last image that I witnessed before my eyes left this world
Were the faces of the opposing cheerleaders,
Their young eyes bleeding blue and yellow,
mascara and grief running down their pretty cheeks.
They knew this from the beginning, my parents did.
They thought I had changed and found a new sport to love.
As my body laid on the floor, my parents laid in the belly of the audience,
Incapable of shedding tears,
because their suffering overtook their ability to cry.

He never asked me for anything.
His humbleness and fruitfulness grew on me
Without knowing that his hand could carve words into ellipticals and parabolas.
His cooking skills were awful,
but he can make a Ramen soup
That'll make your knees melt like overcooked chicken broth.
He was 24 when he first came to this country,
his English broken like the glass protecting his eyes,
He left African battlefields and deserts
To generate cereal boxes and lithium batteries.
His pockets stuffed w/ month-long receipts,
because he always wanted to keep track of where he spent his hard-earned money.
Nobody gave him a cup to **** in, much less a ***.
But he always felt optimism grow in his foreign lungs,
swinging his voice like a hammer to build maturity,
to stand like golden shrines.
He’d pray every night to speak to his lord,
to ask God to help shape him into something a bit more,
like his shoulders were too weak to bear the struggles of his cries.
He works harder than ghosts to keep his heart in this world.
The Beach Boys were his favorite band when he first came here,
and he always babbled about Brian Wilson because he wrote poems.
He searches for lost poems that he's buried inside the mother of his children
He visualizes the pages of these poems,
writing themselves on the faces of his children.
He tries not to see too long, too hard,
because then he may see too much of himself inside his oldest son.