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Jedd Ong Jul 2015
Your children roam the gridlocked streets
hand-in-cardboard, feet firmly on uneven ground,
eyes heavy with the rubble of their foreclosed homes.
They live in grocery carts.

Forget Fifth Avenue, or the Villages,
or the cobblestone streets of young and old,
or the unseen gates of Striver’s Row.
Your heart lies by the subway stations
that ring with the songs of a lonely old man,
his teeth yellowed, but voice golden,
asking not for introductions nor coin,
but for a listener.

New York, they cry for you to hear them.
(Your poor, your tired, and your weary)

Bowery, 6.13.15.
Jedd Ong Jul 2015
Puddles of water
slip your neck
an ever changing
face

while you cry tears
welling not from humanoid
eye ducts
but a patch
of cornea.

It sloshes you
on rainwater
as sea foam rises
from your torso.

Poseidon’s chariot
rolling by.
Jedd Ong Jul 2015
We will build concert houses
next to bomb shelters,

chain theatre chairs
to desert floors,

have in-house orchestras
playing contrite wars.

We will pray each
note rupturing bullet holes,

each baton swing
urging soldiers back,

each bar of sheet music
leaving open invitations.

"Dear visitor,” it will read,
"break whatever you want.

“We all must scream
“to be heard in this desert."
Jedd Ong Jul 2015
A silver pipe strikes me on the left-hand window,
breaking the dullness of these grey hospital walls.

Granddad, you’re due for your umpteenth colonoscopy,
and here I am thinking about how your IV’d wrists
strip away light like a prism.

They bandage the hurt leaking from your eyes
and let rainbows clog up your insides.

(Is that why you can't go, you old geezer?)
(Smile a bit more, will you?)
Jedd Ong Jun 2015
when all is but gone,
books, words,
reduced to dust and
arbitrary faces I
will remember -
cats.

the absurd
pretension in
every line of
an ee cummings
poem.

every
numbered capital
letter.

and I
will
remember
birthday parties.

the little drummer
boys that made
them.

and the
gibberish that only
made sense when
you read it at night
beneath
flashlights.

and I
will
remember
rickshaws.

make-
believe pavllions.

and tucked away
homes hidden in
ol' Kansas bluegrass
half-
asleep.

we,
still somewhat up
at two
in the morning puttering
away at stories so
easily
forgotten.

it is here
where our
rooms stopped time to
break free of metaphors.

where the metaphors
become symbolisms.

where the symbolisms
become you—

I guess
I’d just like to say
that I
will remember
you.

and thank you.
For my lit teacher.
Jedd Ong Jun 2015
I.
It was this Jabawockeez dance back in ’09
where all the members had red
tracksuits, and white masks.

They, popping and locking their way through
to the hiphop world title, a rhythm all their own:
a tight mesh of violins and dropped beats.

II.
Your evenings wake up like their dance routine -
all fuzzy, late edges and hard, sideways locks -
you the trapped light from an old photograph.

Your limbs are a tangle of red tracksuits and gloves,
sterile-white boots, but yellow masks: its sounds full
of their bedtime violins, your heavy beat sunrises.

III.
You take these pills to keep the mornings asleep.
Jedd Ong Jun 2015
Pentagon fights ban on
VEGETABLES!
Russian rockets. Turkish
vote shapes up as refer-
endum on leader. Deng's
MUSHROOMS!
legacy: corruption of par-
ty elite. ECB chief sug-
gests flexibility on Greece.
FISH!
New York Times 6/4/15.
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