The carpenter sits in his rocking chair as he thinks,
as the sun drowns itself into the dark clouds, he waits.
Waiting for something to tell him that he is no longer a boy anymore,
that his maturity and humility have been masqueraded
Into a body that resembles him.
Every night, when he eats, he sits alone
His plate as round as the moon,
He lights one candle on his dinner table.

Most nights, when he is drinking heavily,
he walks to the back of his house,
sits in front of an old wooden bench,
gazing across the lake and he picks up a book,
construing ideas and proposals that he fails to recollect the morning after.
He reads poems to himself, poems from books.
Poems about the nature and history of the human condition,
about the muscles and the tendons in our bodies
that bend and crumble and shiver at our disposal.
Bottle in his left hand, book in his right.
And sometimes he switches hands to highlight his drunken dexterity.
Clinching his book of poems as if they were his children,
too afraid to go out into the soft fear of the electric night,
and he was the wild one to present to this world.

He feels abandoned, dismayed,
and he no longer sees a light at the end this tunnel,
like someone or something is closing it,
leaving a crevice wide enough just to test and to tease
his willing and purpose to escape from it.
He feels a burning in his chest
as he trickles down the last drip of scotch onto his lips,
tasting death like it was tapwater.

It's midnight and he has to wake up in six hours,
wake up to a routine where his work becomes unnoticed
because he doesn't have the ***** to stand up for himself.
So, he sits and he waits for something to happen,
something fantastic or supernatural to help him grow wings
so he could relieve the tension on his shoulders,
his bones realigned to fit the being of gods.
He closes the book, walks back to his house
and blows his one candle at the dinner table,
blackening the room to fit the clouds of the night.
He lies in his bed as he engulfs his body with his comforter,
hoping to never wake up in a world that will not hesitate to laugh in his face.

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.

Drawing attention to oneself is the best illustration to show that you aren't present.
That you may not be transfigured into a rabid popsicle stick.
One day, I may not there for you
to catch all of your raindrops from this clouded season you call truth.
My bones aren't as strong as they used to be,
I'm far from what I once used to be,
and the world carries me around like I'm on its backpack,
unzipping it only to when it's told to do, because in these times,
It's easy to get your backpack stolen if you don't have a key to lock it with.

This world is cruel.
The American dream comes with a reality check made in China.
We hold flowers and bricks on our dying hands,
because as humble and enlightened beings that we are,
Death will not knock on my doorstep
with his scythe hooked across the inside of my gums
without me bashing its skull and stabbing him with his crossbones
Theodore Dreiser never had to walk through the skins of black children
whose lungs had been eaten by politically justified stray bullets,
so unless Sister Carrie is codename for pleasurable manners,
then this little song-and-dance **** list we call USA has gone AWOL.
The doors have risen from the ashes of media grave sites,
and have opened its pathway to those influenced by it.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down as
the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
There was a story of a King
who lead the Great March on Washington, with an army of over 300,000 civil soldiers.
600,000 irises fixated
3,000,000 fingers either spread to invite applause or clinched to offer rebellion.
What was he thinking?
That this dream, this illustrious and renowned dream,
Would submit itself to be injected into the veins and muscles of this body we call America.
No, that is not. No, it cannot be.
Why would any king, let alone this one, allow us to believe
that this nation can live up to the true meaning of its creed,
while the reality spits blood into our faces
with the news coverage of black faces destroyed by black guns.
Are we still dreaming?

Bullets dribble on the pavement like a basketball,
spreading through the hollows of their tips,
knowing that there is no reason as to why
they are being propelled into the bodies of the innocent.
Death creeps on corners like words leaving the roofs of our mouths,
we roar and we rage about the lies of the beautiful reason,
so we spread our shoulders like faith
to lift us off our nimble feet, because our wings are to tired to carry us up.

Five decades have passed, and we are nowhere near that mountaintop.
Because this mountain is impossible, right?
No way can we let freedom ring across this nation,
because we solve arguments the way we solve tactical warfare.
We've turned his dream and made it into our nightmare,
We took his words of action and turned them into questionable ones,
so while some of us may question and criticize how far we've come after fifty years,
others turn the other way, supporting the idea that we're at a post-racist era.
How did we get here? How do we get there? Are we going anywhere at all?
It's easy to see this as a dream,
because we can always change the channel and find something else to watch.
But fifty years is long enough for this coma. It's time to wake up.

The room is clear and the air is filtered
Two chairs for me and her, to separate and segregate
I grind my teeth and I clinch my fist, to the point where
I experience near sudden paralysis in my right hand,
and I think to myself, "I didn't love you because you were rich".
No such things as unaccepted apologies.

Between the two pillars of our own truth, there stands 32 Dr. Phils,
and each one attempts to explain to me
on how to be a reasonable and rational man,
so I can grow old with her, and learn how to fly without having any mosquito wings.
As I sit impatiently in this draconian chair of imprisonment with no restraints,
I think of what we once had and what we can still accomplish
by not believing in things such as unaccepted apologies.

By realizing that we are no longer on training wheels,
That the jagged surface that bridges us,
From a love that can shave diamonds and convert children into angels after death.
And when we get to that bridge, we will see ourselves with our children
as they walk and crawl to our bodies,
infesting their love across our fat bellies with their eyes and their drooling mouths.
I want our children to learn their first words that signify the exact representation
of our relationship;
their vivid sounds of "mamas, dadas, goo-goos, ga-gas"
hanging to our ears like raindrops on windshields,
like a mobile softly swinging over their cribs.

I relinquish myself from this seat as I run to hers,
to grab her, to tell her how ****** this situation is.
How our internal and legal battles are astronomically indifferent
To the spheric gift from God that has shun His light to your tiny stomach,
like the flickering spark of a dying flash.

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.

I close my eyes and create pictures made out of marbles and copper leaves because I ******* want to.
I don't want to become a liberation of mind control just to feed the habit of your addiction.
I don't care that you love poetry, or how much you hate the texture of my cheekbones,
or how much you want my words to taste like laundry detergent,
poisoning the cerebellum to become cerebral to the fear of your words,
I just choose to be able.

I want my words to keep me floated on Yoshi's clouds
while he's feeding me apples and mushrooms.
If my words were able to shape shift, they would embody the physical being of an old wise man
with knowledge that could fill the top of my laundry basket.
His creaking rocking char moving right to left like the turning of a page,
his hands slowly crumbling into ashes of marijuana leaves.
I want to grow old and die while bumping to Pete Rock & De La Soul on my death bed,
and not care about who's listening to my dying breaths about that mirror on my wall.
It's all the same.
We just want to be able.

Every summer when I was a kid,
I learned a new way of whispering to the trees.
In my backyard, there was an apple tree
I named him Marlow.

His tall shadows would swallow the grass whole and consume the clouds,
His wooden teeth biting into the innocent knees and elbows
Of those who underestimated his strength.
Marlow had grown with giants, his roots flat and strong like ancient coffee tables,
And I am confounded.

I reached for his belly only to feel the warmth of the Sun,
Basking in its glory,
the purity of the grass littered with gum wrappers and popsicle sticks.
The kids across the street never took the time to say hi to Marlow,
they felt more suitable with their irises glued to their black boxes in their black living rooms.
I'd lean my body onto the trunk of Marlow, as his roots would tell me stories,
Stories of how my Tarzan belly flops would leave Indian burns on my kneecaps.

My bones became soft and compacted like Italian yogurt,
I was immortal before I could finish grade school.
We spoke incomprehensably to each other,
As if we were fearful of what was being said by those kids
But I never cared, and neither did he.

I was born little, and I grew up a little.
In a small house in Boston,
where I grew up with a mouth full of Skittles
in a town where it was so simple to get lost in.

9 New Whitney Street, constructed of brick and knee scrapes.
We grew and we learned how to say hello to each other without ever actually speaking.
We played hide-and-seek with our knee high socks,
because we found pleasure by slipping and falling to our favorite hiding spots.

It was an average life.
We danced through the streets to our favorite parks,
Each containing a strong color that we would each label through our child-like dialogue
Red park—Monkey bars & pull up contests
Yellow park—Tire swings & puke-infested children slides
Green Park—Two hour kickball series & poison ivy ankle blisters.

When they'd come home from work,
my mom would always come to my room to check that I was there,
and not out collecting memories in these colorful parks.
My dad would slam his face onto our couch pillow,
his frail body parallel to the sofa,
With an unopened Heineken in his palm and his eyes glared on Larry King.

They said hello to each other without ever opening to their mouths.
And on nights, when it would drop below freezing,
my mother would wrap the plants she made earlier that day into blankets,
and drag the tall ones inside.

On those freezing nights, my father would wrap the pipes with tape,
and allow them to drip throughout the night,
it was an average life.
Nothing more or less special than the families we were surrounded by.

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.