the cat snores
at midnight, below

call centre agents:
bathed in white lights above
and the security guard’s badge below which gleams
of splendour; reflects the moon
by his chest: waxing
where it rises
and waning as it falls; a truck’s engine
roaring in the distance. my footstep

stirs not the cat

I fight quietly at dawn's
Candlelight, fight softly
But surely with genteel
Fist—heart—

Softly beating—ticking—
Like a clock—dancing—tik—
Dancing—tok—hammering
The ghosts that frequent
These halls—
The white washed walls—
Which shrink at the sight

Of dawn—beautiful dawn!
And day—O luminous day!

I met Grandfather at a Taiwanese bookstore.

For some reason,
We were the only ones staring
At the decrepit
Poetry section
In this, brand new
Four-story library.

He was grinning as if
The teeth in his mouth
Was real again.

And I couldn't help but
Smile with him too, this
Old man

Who stuck his hands in
His pockets and slouched
Over books just like
I once did.

Who couldn't speak a word of
English, but who

Over and over again muttered
The name "Auden,"
As to signal to me

That he knew exactly what
Was going on here.

Nodded vigorously at me—
Told me he'd met him once, before.
In a book.
Probably in Cantonese—
I wonder how it sounded to him?

I wonder how I sounded?
Peering over him
Like a sprightlier shadow,
Also muttering to himself
"Auden, Auden,"

As if trying to remember.

I think,
When I grow up,
I would like to be
An old man someday.

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.

I.

Sickly, dark-skinned Joseph
Bustos was in a suit,
picked his phone from his
Pocket and asked us to take
Him a selfie as he motioned
To the statue of an eerily staring,
Possibly demonic Ronald
McDonald languidly swaying
On a faux-park bench. Collective

Laughter - "Are you serious,
"Man?" We said, having all heard
Full well stories of
****** painted clown statues
Moving its creaky bones
At the crack of dawn only
To devour our soul. "Are
"You serious,
"Bustos?" we genuinely taunted -
"Well I'll have a mirror," he told us
"So don't worry." I never

Quite got what that meant.

II.

The laughter and tales of
Business school and
Med school continued full on
Into the late (school) night,
Dense tails of superglued
Frog brains, Chinese economics,
Girl problems in the
Philippine stock exchange drowning
The macabre absurdity
Of the take out
Terror, Ronald

Staring blankly into the crevasse of
The night, and we absurd,
Blanketing in laughter scarred and scared
Wanting to approach
The chained playground but shivering
At the slightest hints
Of movement - which of

Course

Came. And Jack
Yeung (The largest, yellowest
Of us all, perhaps smartest too,
Studying in Hong Kong)
Leapt, at which we laughed,
And made jokes about how
The cockroaches
Matched the color of
Our country's skin, made it
Crawl not just because
Of its stick thin haunches,
But its brownness,
Seediness, inconcealable

III.

To which we laughed - yellowed
Out, almost as pale
As the sticky ice
Cream cups that adorned our
Table, pale not though,

From lineage but rather
The collective rosiness of our
Disillusioned, ice
Cream-fed cheeks, and the fear
Of darkness, and eerie
Whitefaced Ronald, and
Brown cockroaches and

Spirits that could move
Frozen marble faces. Bustos
Gestured quietly
To his cellphone,
Gazed downward and muttered
Something about
Fraternities and connections.

IV.

Behind our mutterings,
The Movement: children,

Coffee-stained and tattered rag
Shorts slit open like grass stained
Skirts, holding their bony
Hands and kissing Ronald's
Hollowed cheeks like he was
An ancient god. "Stop,"
I imagine us warning them,
"Evil spirits, dark and deep
"As night itself, haunt his body.
"Stay away - we've studied
"His countenance plenty."

They would only laugh though,
And continue to stroke
His paint-chipped cheek,
Brown - not
Ghost-thinned cockroach,
But rather rich
Like brewing coffee and
Fertile

Soil.

Grandfather's whistle
Blew down the chipped clock,
Face in shock, broken glass.

Glasses. He was blind to its sound,
Faintly tinged, his arm and red,
Cheeks sallow like a hound's.

He stood there frozen:
Shoulders taut and brazen
But eyelids twitching,

Fingers quivering
As he balled his hand into a fist.

This is the first thing I've been proud of in days:
The imperfection of worship-
Cracking voices and out of tune guitars,
Heartbeats that overtake the
Tempo by a timid half-step

And that sole audience member
That is shameless in singing,

His arms outstretched and his feet,
Dancing for You
And the Whatever Remains of this broken church
Following suit,
Singing and singing and singing
With timbres soft, loud, high, low,
Shattering glass and
Letting go,

Still vastly outnumbered by
The skipped beats and fumbled notes
But ****** if they aren't gonna try to keep up!

God,
This is the first thing I've been proud of in days:

Brothers and sisters that do not yield
To the emptiness and the void
That comes with worshipping You!

You,
Who would too, alone sing for the return
Of your own children,
Who would close your eyes
And weep in silence with a resounding "Yes!"
At the sight of your sons returning,
Your daughters returning,

Your chosen ones responding,
"I'm coming home tonight!"

Weeping for joy with a resounding, "Yes!

"I'm finally coming Home."

Five AM.

Dawn is the one remnant of the 1800s left in all of us - the weather. And even that disappears quickly. The pockets of morning stuck between you and me, between this car, and that car, and Dawn's Appalachian highway slipping itself in between the SLEX and the sky take your breath away and slip past consciousnesses like faint dreams. You snap awake. ****** reminder that it's already

Five AM.

Faint strains of rooster crow and traffic whistle keeping you up despite your desire to sleep. This bus ride is meant for sleeping, rather. Your teammates lean on pillowcases shifting hues from black to gray to light pink to faint orange. You stare quietly out the ever shifting window. Somehow your eyes keep track of the streaks of light running alongside it. Somehow you're awake even if it's just

Five AM.

The sky is the one part of our cities that isn't yet covered in *******. Outlines of shantytowns and exhaust smoke belching smokestacks and piggeries and overpriced skyscrapers provide platforms for the sun's pink rays to shine upon but still it rises above it. With it. Through it. Over and around. Sunset mornings that glow with an innocent hue. Some say Apollo preferred the form of a young boy whenever he'd come down to Earth. Makes for easier running, I guess. The roads look wider at

Five AM.

The sky is the one part of our cities that isn't yet covered in *******. The time it takes for one photon of light to hit the surface of the Earth is eight minutes. Light is far. Light is distant and twisted and radiant. Light provides surface for the sky - paints the floors of heaven by which we gaze upon with bleary eyes and pray to. God walking on our ceilings. Humans knocking on our floors. Alarm clocks reminding me it's just

Five AM.

It's just

Five AM.

To watch piano keys tune
Is like righting a broken bone:
Process somewhat crude
But still very much a need.

The maestro looms like a wolf,
Making every note weep
Though to the intensity he is aloof,
As if in a dream—

Or perhaps a nightmare;
He hears the shrieks and jumps,
Perhaps exaggerated by the glares
Of looming ghouls—necromancy.

The notes holding as if a pathos
Back to the world of the living.

They guard our gates. We are ruled by mechanised gods.

We are not free.
We are not real.
We are not awake.

Our mornings wake up to dew and smoke. We wake up and pick up our broomsticks and sweep.

You and I are made to sweep.
And it is through these sweeps we dance our fated dances.

Dance to wake the castles,
and water the gardens,
and venerate Emperors long dead and gone.

“This,” we say, “is our duty.”
“To belong.”

“To bow together.”
“To hope as one.”

We, all key cogs in the machinery. Everyone has a broom and dustpan. Everyone is made to sweep.

"Is this the land," we ask, "that we sang for and dreamt our feverish cartoon dreams for?"
Perhaps not. Our stories exist only in a land beyond time.

We’ve been there. It is a mechanism for the gods. They too hold brooms.

They too sleep in shrines of stone.
They too live in temples of steel.

The gold ones have long ago burned.

The puppet strings
That light
Your banana yellow
Face strikes
A hollow pang.

Your roommate
Speaks with the gloomy
Eloquence
Of a Greek tragedy,
Or an American vision
Of a corrupted Greek tragedy,
Or maybe a lonely English
Counterpart well you get the
Point—

Two lovers
Wrought in silk and wool
Sweaters
Forever unaware
Of the fact that no matter
How devoted
They are to each other’s
Well-being,

Their eyebrows will forever
Never touch.

we are not butterflies
wings splayed flat across tables
like specimens. we are
not fluttering in the wind
like figurines. we are
life

and love, and hope and
faith floating eternally
in the distance, just
and beneath our grasp. past
the skies we fly still,
splayed across blue
like specimens. poised
to spring to life
like figurines. we

are beautiful. we
are strong. we
are feeble, and plastered,
and nailed half-folded
to surfaces that scrape against
our cheeks but still
we fly. still

we are not butterflies.

I'd imagine the severance
Of man
From God as
The severance
Of day
From night—

Blissful half wrought in eternal
Darkness—heat—light
Led to believe that

Wholeness is but
The reduction of an appendage
As to allow
The imminent struggles of
Grip
To make you stronger

Somewhat more
Intense,
Insistent the feelings of
Despair and grief
And ultimately
Illusory

Joy.

The sutures of granite stone
Slip seamlessly and stand—

Ignorant of the storms that
Weather its skin—

Gold and diamond visage
Shivering—hollow—
Eyes refusing to glaze over—

Arms clasping the afflicted.

Jay-Z sounds like he's underwater. And the showerhoses tilt shut and the bathroom door opens to reveal - well, what I thought was a sealing wound thankfully turned out to be headphone covers and my brother's obscured big toe. Trembling.

He walks as if he was the rapper himself - chest hunched, back lurching forward like that of a street cat who doesn't know he's made it. Shaky feet, wet hair, darkened eyes that hadn't been shut for days.

''For my father was black, and beautiful, and beautiful, therefore, black. There was a blackness to him that was beautiful. A blackness entirely clear and his own.'' -James Baldwin, Notes on a Native Son (paraphrased).

His legs if you roll up the pajama bottoms are filled with quilt patched mosquito bites and blacks and blues. Self-inflicted. Eyebag patches punched back into his face resurfacing in the hidden contours of his thigh. Trembling. Allow me to reintroduce myself. Trembling.

He is and he isn't. No native son of ours black but yellow covered, yellow but eyes tinged with red, and awash in shadows black and blue - he is beautiful - puffy eyed, brickfaced boombox carrying screamer of profanity and tongue tied silence all and still - he is black, and he is beautiful.

An underwater mixtape taking shape to be a broken record anthem.

do i want to lie flat in your prison cells? perhaps not.
but i do know that the curse of our words is that
they will one day swap out our air for oxygen,
and we will breathe ink down our throats; gasping
for sound.

it is inevitable. these vestiges of mind matchless to those
who give chase - we who disappear like ghosts - one day
to resurface - our bodies in exchange. we will be beaten
by batons, cut open by silver: a cuff for a tongue. we perish
for our

                      speech.

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.

for my pastor, for my father, and for a friend.

6.
i find your name carved quiet by the windowsill
in an empty room.

5.
i find half your coat hanging wayside where once his coat was, too.

4.
father told me you too keep your dentures in a cup like grandfather’s.

3.
that you were there as he packed his bags and warbled off
for the hospital. you didn’t talk to him then
but still we knew. or so he did:

he caught you smiling by the desks where he worked.

2.
i find your photographs by the balcony,
and your footprints by the garden. bits of your
hair by the pavement next to candy wrappers and
pencil jars.

1.
together we pick up the pieces you left behind. and sew. and stitch
ourselves together. open our mouths in silence.

0.
we wait for your next visit.

It is impolite to wonder
whether the hot air balloon in your
lungs have begun to deflate,
grandfather.

Whether you wish to float away.
Dad said you never feared flying -
dad said nothing about it, rather.
But I fear for you.

You are old. Older than I can ever imagine.
You are frail but for the globes rising
in your chest and stomach; they fall
with each frail breath.

Let it carry you away. Do not
let these wires hold you down. They do not
pump poison into your body. They do not
let the heat escape.

If it must, it will, grandfather. The ceased oldness
in you expanding and contracting
at will. You will not die without a fight,
grandfather. Oh you will.

Some days,
I'll be waiting outside
On the street corners

Carrying nothing but
An umbrella and wearing
Nothing but the toughest,
Driest, warmest clothes
I have.

And only on those days
When I am ready for the
Rain to fall

Does the rising, shrouded sun
In all her yellow-white
Glory decide to come out
And smile.

I’ve been hauling a lot of baggage lately,
And they strike me as quite useless.

It’s like how Patrick brought a suitcase full of rocks
To the Krusty Tower just so that he’d have
Something to bring to the hotel
With a useless employee elevator.

The things we carry around with us
Are a lot like that—unnecessary
Backbreakers that threaten to unhinge us.

And days like this make me feel like Squidward:
Stuffy nose, heavy suction cups for feet.

Days like this make me want
To sit down.

Days like this make my food taste like they’ve
All been covered in cheese, toenail clippings,
And nose hair, which by the way reminds me—

“We shall never deny a guest,
“Even the most ridiculous request.”

(Days like this only lasts an episode.)
(Which is like, thirty minutes.)
(So keep going.)

Round and round the black tape went,
Swaths of it came, and left unbent,
Around my wrists, and around his mouth,
From back to front, from north to south...

Round and round the tape unfurled
Spinning and spitting, his lips- they curled!
Sneering and snickering, bitterly he yelled,
"What good is a God who's secrets don't tell?"

While mourning and weeping in this valley of tears,
His mighty hands shook with them ancient fears,
Tongue wet with wine, lips dry in stutter,
He buckled his knees with all faith he could muster...

While he, the mournful jeerer lost,
Quickly towards the garden rushed,
As darkness, nearer and nearer, hushed,
Left him to ponder its cost.

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.

I still think
Heaven is a small
Town with bright
Blue eyes and the
Sound of a child's
Laugher—

That it unknots
The brows of even
The most weary of
Philosophers.

I still think
Heaven is a small
Garden encrusted with
White feathers and
The west-wound winds
Coming from the Atlantic.

An old harbor—Vladivostok—
Spelled perfectly,
Abandoned by
Knaves and all the carnage they left,
Or Ceasaria:

Dry bed of luminous ruins.

I imagine You beckoning us:
"Don't be afraid, come!"—
Revealing pockets of
Nature only you would have
The courage to call

Beautiful.

I can spend hours
Losing myself in this
Transcendent embrace—
Chest warm and welcoming,
Always understanding.

Father's advice not
In the things he says but
In the curves of His
Brow, contours
Of His smile—quiet,
Present.

And know that these streets are irresponsible,
and that you are too. And that no matter
how bright your eyes and headlamps may be
you will always find something you didn’t
see before. Life will always be throwing at you
curveballs. And car insurance. And the ungainly heft
of police officers leering in lustily at the watch on your
wrist and the hollowed, hungry eyes of your companion.

Do not answer them, I beg of you, when they ask
you too for your name and your father's,
for they truly care not to hear
its sound. They only want to add to the noise -
continue living beneath its dins. Not after money but the
fear, the control that from you stem. Now, yes
I may be over-exaggerating (after all, it was but one
slight dent in the bumper of the car, but

there is no exaggeration to the voicelessness of they
who queued before me, no companions guiding them,
no voices shouting for them.) He, they, there, by the streets,
only has in his hands a car horn. And so he honks.
And so the siren wails. And so the chaos reigns.
And so do they - officers - living silently beneath it all,
urging us onward to yelling and screaming and shouting.
And yet we can’t. And we don’t. And we won’t.
And yet they, for all their damages, do not - scratch,
refuse not - to do so.

They only can look down at the pavement,
dotted yellow, black and white dashed.

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.

It's 3
Am and I'm
Still
Up writing
Your paper
Explaining why you
Can't seem to stick,
Your commas in the
Right
Places.

It's 3
In the
Morning and
I am staring
At Ollie's
Baseball glove
Green ink scrawled
With poems
Which he reads
When the third innings
Are dull When
***** become too trivial to
Catch.

It's 3
In the
Morning and I
Am sick and
Tired of watching
You make out
With
Every
Girl
You pick up
At this
Phoney
School.

It kills me.

You have no idea
How it
Kills me.

Sometimes I wonder whether
The monsters underneath our beds
Have simply learned
To leave us alone

Fully knowing that the fear comes
Regardless.

Knowing that many times we scare
Ourselves into thinking
Once we dream
We will never wake.

That every night we hear
Sirens
And ambulances wailing-

Mistaking them for gunshot wounds
Buried deep within
Our chests waiting
To resurface.

And we dream of our stretchers.
Of if our arms
Will seamlessly tuck
Into
Our chests as we curl up
Beneath the smoke and
Rubble
Of to-
Morrow.

As if our sleep leaves open wounds
Left for them to
Sew.

There was a time when I watched it happen.
Strangers pressed to other strangers
in one bed, clothes on, air humid
with the cloying scent of fruit juice
and *****; none of us
giving into another and yet unwilling to leave the scene
of that possibility,
pretending to sleep, actually sleeping.
Then waking again to slip a hand
over a shoulder, slide a finger
inside the waistband of a skirt; so young
(we are even now still
so young) in that hotel room
turning blue then lighter blue.
We wouldn’t have tried for more:
the kiss, the button; firm, white shape
of an image slipped wholly into the mind,
acted upon, dreamed upon,
filling the thin vessels of the lungs.

Earlier, a film, its forced sounds
of *******. The tension I felt winding
into the muscles of some of the others in the room.
I remember I left for awhile.
We all left for awhile;
even the music was frightening. How
to strip ourselves like that, point
at the places that were wanted, plucked
and peeled; speaking the words, hearing them form us,
the nature of what we were
and could do to each other?
The music, the rocking, the sobbing.
The man called the woman by parts of herself.
Some laughed at this. I remember
I must have been one of them.
In the morning, the hotel room was turning white.
After the long night, hands were slipping
and unslipping, moving over the flattened pillows
as if in hopes something small could still satisfy us.
Someone turned and looked at someone else;
we all heard it. Legs
shifted, sheets slid themselves down waists
or shoulders, tightened again at the necks
of those pretending to sleep as the unblinking sun
crawled in our window.
From another room, coughing,
We all heard it.
Someone looked at someone else.
The room turned white. The air began clearing.

Out in the willow
a caged bird
sings

wound up slowly
by metallic
strings

drunkenly stumbling and
twirling about

hopping clumsily
on a branch.

Out in the willow
a caged bird
sings

chirping mechanically
about nonsensical things

drunkenly stumbling
and twirling about

perched precariously
on a lance.

Out in the willow
a caged bird
cries

spiraling towards
an untimely demise

drunkenly stumbling and
twirling about

groggily swelling, his breast
full of doubt

out in the willow
a caged bird
Falls.

The deeper you stare into
The flotsam,
The clearer our origin stories
Become:

We are shipwrecks.

Islands
Bro-

ken Like bread and
Doused in
Salted wines.

We are cupbearers,

Slaves
With rusted chains
That dangle
Loosely
From our ankles,

Shrouding our skin from the harsh
Freedom

Sun offers.

The book folds to reveal
The real world,
Beneath my crouched knees

Untied sneakers sprawled
All over the floor, muddy.

There is a silent joy in
Watching others consume
Realities all too
Different,
And all too
Common to
Yours—"unreal,"
Ethereal.

Perhaps all too so.

For the past two days
I've caught the people
Crouching beside me
Sniffling.