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By day he wore a face of stone,
a man at work, a man at home.
Mid-tier, mid-forties, fading fast,
a shadow built to never last.

Unseen, unseen, the hours crawled,
his name half-heard, his voice forestalled.
Reliable. Invisible.
Forgettable. Admissible.

But night —
night gave him another skin,
a grinning mask, a skeleton grin.
Blurry selfies, pumpkin puns,
cheap delights for midnight ones.

And they laughed.
They saw.
He mattered more
than the man he’d left behind the door.

She answered louder than the rest,
late-twenties, lonely, dispossessed.
Her laughter quick, replies too fast,
his irony returned as gospel, cast.

“I know this isn’t you,” she said.
“I want the man who hides instead.”

He recoiled.
Deleted.
Ghosted.
Fled.

But silence is a mask that turns,
and absence is a fire that burns.

3:33, the phone alight,
a skeleton meme each waiting night.
3:33, a plastic hand,
a note enclosed: You’ll understand.
3:33, the offering grows —
a pumpkin smashed, its seeds exposed.

Her love became a ritual rhyme,
his jokes became a curse in time.
“You don’t get to leave,” she swore,
“You owe me you, forevermore.”

And he —
the man who sought the crowd,
who wanted laughter, not too loud,
who craved the gaze but feared the weight,
found every mask could seal his fate.

No one is innocent here, no one.
Not the trickster, not the one undone.
He wore deception like a shield,
she made obsession her battlefield.

Now only one mask still remains —
cheap plastic grin through windowpanes.
Spoopy, childish, still, absurd,
yet sharper than his final word.

The curtains gap, the silence bends,
a tilted grin that never ends.
And he knows, beneath the grin so slight:
her mask will never leave the night.
He says ,"Everyone deserves the least if they want the most !"

I twist the loose strands of the wicker rocker

"You work hard all you life for nothing ."

"You don't sleep , you blink and bleed while you think , what for !"

"There's no escape , no loose rage in the hot sauce of defeat !"

"No escape , no sleep , don't slip , don't quit . Just bleed and blink and think !"
Perhaps life outside the seascape of emotion
is worth trying to, just live & never expecting
high demand.

Perhaps life gets bitter when your
too alone for such a long time, it's like
You seek company but you never did.

Perhaps life outside writing are more
Challenging than the play of words,
Trying to dare the truth that never
Comes out.

Perhaps life gets busy on things that
didn't matter, you laze around and
listening to stories never your own.
Trying to pass time, like a passerby
Never staying, you just fade in the
background of things you wish
it's Yours...

Perhaps life outside my inspiration
I'm too forgiving, too passive, and
too sensitive that I never care for
Myself. I care too much on my own
Prison that I forgot to believe on myself.

I don't write like I used too,
because I care too less like
I used too...
i guess this is my life.
Velvet echoes in these faded places,
Plastic smiles on porcelain faces.
Whiskey tears in crystal glasses,
Dead-eyed queens and faded masses.
And it’s eerie, but oh, it’s sweet;
My dying dreams feel most complete.
Masking my hurt behind the glamour,
No more dawn and no forever.
Hard to voice, too numb to break,
I'm dancing in circles putting the F in ache…
Este mundo ya está lleno
de víctimas  que entregan
el sacrificio de su vida por una idea,
por nociones abstractas.

Los santos nos rodean con sus muertes,
vidas blancas, ascéticas,
momentos infelices,
sin éxtasis corporales.

Ejemplares por su sufrimiento,
Pero ya no lo quiero.

Busco una utopía dulce en palabras
llena de gente que siente algo,
escribiendo nuevas páginas
de la existencia humana.

No quiero más crucificados,
ni sumisión, ni glorificación.
El misterio duele demasiado.

Echo de menos un mundo equilibrado,
colmado de seres humanos vivientes,
Tengo miedo de los  chivos expiatorios.

¿Es demasiado pedir?
AE
I wrote this reflection two years ago.
In Đà Nẵng my friends cradled me like a child.
We screamed Taylor bridges,
tequila-toasted in bars until the lights blurred.
A single candle in the bathroom
danced warm sighs through open windows,
and all felt calm.

I grew new muscles balancing on a motorcycle,
sometimes gripping Harry’s jacket,
sometimes throwing my weight into the wind.
The city flared neon and gasoline in stuttered traffic,
but along the coast
he drove so fast the vibrations in my chest harmonized.
I pictured my bones becoming butterflies if I let go.

Last year I entered the year of the dragon on a futon,
swayed to sleep by a hundred chanting voices from the temple next door
while Bailey burned incense for her ancestors below.
I did not dream of dragons.
I only learned to breathe fire.

The year of the snake slid in with new bones and old habits.
It hissed that suffering could be scripture
until letters slithered free from the page
and coiled like cold jewelry around my wrist.

That was the shedding.
Salt water peeling old skin away,
songs shouted so loud they drowned the ache,
poems that did not start tragic,
nights when my body finally kept time with the moon.

Then at home the dog’s teeth found my hope.
A terrified mouth rerouted rivers
through my soft parts.
A jewel carved from my nose.
Six punctures blooming across my arms like altars.

In Vietnamese stories the snake waits beneath the water
to claim whoever dares the bank.
I wonder if I was chosen the moment
I opened my mouth in those bars,
when I leaned into the bike’s curve
as if danger could be a love song.

Now I lie awake at hours unnamed,
tracing scars that hiss answers back.
Vietnam hums inside me still,
the candle, the coast, the chorus of friends,
but I cannot tell if they are memories
or if the snake is still awake inside me.

They say snakes shed to grow,
but no one warns you how thin the new skin feels,
how everything burns against it,
how you mistake survival for prophecy.

I touch the scar and wonder
if I am still that girl clinging to the bike,
or if the snake has already swallowed me,
patient, sleepless,
feeding on my own venom.
There is an eerie silence in waiting—
a hollow ache where time unravels,
a chair left empty,
a breath caught between the ribs
when a shadow
or a song
reminds me of you.

We were not ready—
two trembling hands
unable to hold without breaking.
Perhaps in another life
we will be braver.

But here,
the silence screams louder than words.
The phone glows blank—
a cruel rejection without your voice.
I push it away,
as though distance could sever the pulse
that binds me still to you.

I do not miss you—
not in the way the world defines missing.
I do not yearn for love—
not in the way stories paint it sweet.
Yet somewhere,
a buried vein of me
still bleeds your name.

In the uneasy hush of maybe,
I linger here—
in the half-lit corridor
where absence hums like a haunting.

And nothing haunts me more
than the ghost
of what we could have been.
In the Rhambangle, the climbing vines
looped themselves up and through the latticework
like emotions falling from a dream.

You loved the hour-bound birds who made their nests
in the high corners; feathered keepers
without ceremony, counters of our soft seconds and all the rest.

I liked your boots, especially tucked beneath a wicker chair
in the moonlight, lost to your feet
but called a curious thing by the avante garde among the moths of local wing.

I haven't said it well, I realize. My irises kept the words
after I first saw them in morning light.
It's a fool's errand, so they say, making these sounds no string nor key would own,

but I keep trying, because I love you down to the detail, the divinity, the dissonance, and the bone.
written 2016, extensively reworked 2025

"Rhambangle" is an invented word
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