Daylights fading
Locked in my self
The music slowly dies out

Everything is a passing gray
As the dim out my room
Becomes  my loneliness

So on a night
As dry as a seed
The fourth child
Leaned in towards the darkness
Barely a summer's past of his sixth year
He bubbles with the hope
Of children so unaware
They mirror a blank sun

As the abyss catches on
With his flaming wonder
He saw a gleaming mirror
Of himself upon the dull walls
Waving like a tide
On the high cliffs
He goes and goes
Unstoppable as a waterfall

The shadow looks back
Black as his eyes
Fluid as the tips of his hair
It resembled a cloak
Inscrutable like fear
Familiar like beauty
Mirroring the infinite glide
He strokes with the brushes of youth

An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
Inflections of the same stock
Light the destroyer and creator of kin
But the child
Smiles to himself, undaunted
His counterpart toothless
Breathless as a rock
Could not.

There is an absence of light
screaming around me
It is the first of February
the night crawling, an obituary
Conspicuous and hung with death.

A blackout
the local electric company
has yet to be friendly
I didn't mind
The air was young and a tease
Through the windows it approached
Like a growing fire
Closing in on my bare ribs
Soothing my sore mind

Out on the receiving territory
Comes the warm excess
Like oranges hilted on wax
It was sad claiming
They wage brighter wars
Than my soul
But I inhaled their spirit
For a quietness lived in their glow

Barks scrape against the summer dread
Unable to shut their stubborness
They connive with the crickets
For a night of overture
I can smell ambivalence
In the starless skies
Will it cry?
Or will it die along as with everything?

I'd embrace the cold with
My equally hostile arms
It treats me with dignity
From outside the cars screech
Like a wailing woman
Stalling the witch's eye
With fragments of yellow and white
Onto the oblivion of the roads
And the loneliness of a night just
Coming to life.

The clouds scatter askew
Into the dimness of mere moments to twilight
Water jumped on my skin
Playing run and hide
Sifting pieces of a small town
Into a phantom's mosaic
I was a spectator to the familiar
While mother has sent me
To an errand of a quarter pound of ginger
Those deformed baby toe-like things
Hideous almost supernatural

A middle aged cabby stops
With a knowing look
On to my face that only moves
To answer, not to question
I sat down on the old leather chair
A waft of fish and dried sweat
Dust and a little exhaustion
Regaining his gear, every bit
A weary man and so
The drive went silently
As a secret.
The exhausted cement path
Looked frozen, deserted
As a widow's heart.

There were faces of mixed hues like
Technicolor film in a psychedelic haze
Lined like domino pieces
In the streets of this sick town
Some leaving, some going
To some smaller street perhaps
Off to estrange their lives
From grey shanties, small lumps of
Grains on their shaky family tables.
Like the downpour they are sad
Sadder than the cabby's squeaking wheels
Between the tension of the road
And the misfortune of its master
I say hello like an egg laid by chance
In a nest made for spiders
I do not belong here
But the web ties me head first.

Mother those dead people in the books
Who pen tragedy, brew empathy in a whisk of their words
Seem to understand me better than you do
And to think they say mothers
Have intuition
As razor sharp as your mouth
For someone with so much ability
You fail at seeing nearby distances

No I will not become a mother
Like yourself
I refuse to believe a world
That doubts me as I am
I am a woman
And they see me as less than a man
How absurd my fictional mother
Maya Angelou made me think
I was more

Read Sylvia Plath if you could just
Maybe you'll hear the voice of my soul
Which you have rightly marked
By your own answers
No I will keep wearing
Worn out sneakers and dip them
In mud once in a while
Also, I do not want anyone
To tell me my femininity
Is anchored on fair complexion,
Rose red lips that open
Only to say yes
Because it is not mother dear

You see I have learned a lot from pain
To understand that what is good is
people as they are and were
I have learned enough from a curse
That lives within me
(And which you dont seem
to comprehend)
That I believe in myself
No matter how much
Broken bones lie beneath me
I've died so many times mother
But I lived again and again
To be mad, to be absolutely
irrevocably insane
Headfirst, a marked man
But nevertheless alive
Before those who tell me
I am a nonexistence.

It's a sick, sick town
Where men have come to rot
As a worm infested fruit
Lying wet and rummaged on the ground

The neighbors with their bent noses
And upturned mouths
Bubbling with the agenda, the filth
Of their smiling counterparts next door
In town fiestas they squalor like
Emperors on roasted pigs, rice cakes
and goat bellies raised and slaughtered
They dine like fine crickets loud
And unconcerned about matters
Which the small town does not speak

Scoundrels of politicians
Fetchig money like leaves from their
Cotton pockets
Oh the election is under way!
Come come there is money this way!
Forget honesty it can only buy
You a rumbling stomach and a hut
Crumbling from debts and frets!

Who cares though
When seventy strides from you
Gunshots sparkle in the midnight skies
All eyes fainted all breaths shallow
And someone's just got wallowed
In a heat of greed and contempt
Poor son!Poor son!
Used to know the wretch
No family?No peso to his name?
Let's move on to our siestas
Justice won't spare us from hell

God has saved a seat for us instead
The church has made its job clear
Seven Sundays and we are but saved!
But the crowd upon
The altar thins like the old priest's head
Gleaming like chalice
In the dimming lights of the Lord
The people look on and yawn
For the gospel has now become
As good as miracle, literally.

The poor remain poor
The sinful prosper
And this sick, sick town
Has its marrows ******
Dry as a liar's throat
And you tell me to love it
Like a sweetheart of brazen days?
Like the grazing stars in the
Blank fields of bluish horizons
I painted with amulets and rockets
with my visions as a child?
And you tell me I was born of a town
About to sweep into nothing along
with the collapse of its people?

I am wine in a jack-in-a-box cellar
Wonderlands, neverlands propelling in a boomerang war
Exalting stubborn as weeds in the gardens of well-tended graves
As far off as the most withered waves

I'll drop my roses of singularity
And let the world leap topsy turvy

Eyes turned upside down like folded floral peels before a fallen angel
Rubbing errant pointed brushes against an airy easel
The teapots are now dancing round rainbow tornadoes
Clocks reverse themselves in a scourge of a prose

I'll drop my roses of singularity
And let the world leap topsy turvy

Singing horses dallying kings and queens with whips of cod
Skinny, scorned nutcrackers lolly gagging for a later maraud
Spoons racing Jack and Jill down a spiny valley of prats
I'd shut them off, they come alive with vicious spats

I'll drop my roses of singularity
And let the world leap topsy turvy

My trappings with all things mad
Wafted me ajar a silvery smoke of sad
I breathe the clouds of my helter skelter
As if in every catatonic whir it flutters rises an answer

*I'll drop my roses of singularity
And let the world leap topsy turvy

I can't make brushes
dance all flamenco—
red, blue, purples
on a peacock's feathery
canvas

Nor can I raise
unborn symphonies
from a string's womb

Instead, I piece
words caught
like fireflies
in the air
stir their light
through and through
in cosmic metaphors
in sea allegories
in flights of soliloquies
in lovelorn colloquies

Really,
I can't dazzle eyes
nor fuddle ears
but I behold
the days to come
with tongues from
yesteryears

To this old, defeated apple
Skin blazoned in rosy tunic
Slippery as fate discarded, fate in a bubble
How you've crossed my sight like a cynic

You rest cold and unamused
In my warm, subversive hands
It's as if your insides have set themselves loose
Unarmed in their pure dwindling strands

Fat worms whiffed spotless fields of honey-gold
Floundering shallow water fishes in unconscious fathoms
Seared the sweet flesh with spawns in manifold
You stand still in spite of downtrodden autumns

I took you in my mouth, your rot conspicuous
As if you whimper upon my numb tongue
That you won't last an age longer in this limping malice
Where your seed grows only to get wrung

I'll stop dreaming before they bludgeon me maudlin
Then run. Run off the mill, playing on a paramount race
The light fumes at the tail of a muffled crawlspace
My calloused heels wait, flaring the barest crimson

The wheel makes the world go round, oh quiet defeat
Fed quite fat with golden grease in gun blood
No sullen faced ant ever bites back to chew the cud
On this highway to hell, ****** in an infinity eight

They'll can me like a fish, consumed to be eaten at last
Those who roar with an industry on their mechanical spines
Smoke the steam from black lungs dying as the lifelines
Don't ask anymore, their hands are wide, lips pressed

I know it's hard to say yes
to the fists and clamps
of pain
to reconcile with the
fact that like the thread
you must go through
the small sliver of
needle relief
simply because
you still are not
the person you are

And you'll hit and miss
so many times
in innumerable ways
until that small,bright
area becomes your
own.

I have killed myself
thus far with only caffeine
in my string of nerves.

Anxiety looks on at my
hinges loose with each patter
of its dark grooves in my lips
I feel as tensed as
I already am.

My mind suddenly
pitching thoughts of
five or more different
ways I'll go gone as I pursue
the silent knives
in the kitchen or play along
the open danger of the fields.

I am dizzied up in heaps
of misty scenes under
each blink like the milky way
taking home in the blankets
of my lids.

What has spun dimless
like bright-eyed goblins
in the tightening of my ribs
creeps upward and downward
both of us lost in the tremor
of coffee,coffee and maybe
even some cream.

One cup, one cup
of all that is grave, unsolicited
of all things frail
stirred in a cauldron of my
own fairy god witch,
paranoia that *****.

But as I concur needful of
the eartheness, the subjectivity
I am hopeful, I am vital
I am called to hear life
beyond my worry
of dying as the world watches
on with coffee in their hands,
perhaps brewed
perhaps ****.

Juxtaposed between fear
and hope sits coffee for
some ******* chair
of a reason.I have hung on
to it like poison and antidote
mixed like hot and cold tea,
like Hades and Persephone.

I have wished for it
to stay with the fallout
of scuttling equilibrium.

Because it tastes so wrong
but it makes me right,
somehow,  somewhere
I can't quite place.

Since when have words abandoned me?
Since when have they mixed up with atrophy not symphony?
I see myself fixed on a page that bears no more meaning to me

These are hieroglyphics not my life in symbols
These are objects not reanimations
These are dots not wholes
I am an eyeless Beethoven
Instead I long for words in my memory

Stacks of blank paper flying around the block
They are dead , long gone, hell bent
No eulogies my old friends
I am simply apologetic
For you ascended me to galaxies
But in a vacuum I can't seem to think of you

I am thankless, the idiot
My mind is a boiling cauldron
With a Salem spell, I must be bewitched
I do not recognize the person
reading the stories like they are rocks
I feel no longer, I dream no longer

The voices in the pages were once
 bursts of 'I'
Wandering muse, exalted beings
Not the cacophonies of devils
in my head
Not the powerlessness of a victim.

How disbelieving and cruel
That we are embroiled in wars
Yet no one takes charge
No one takes hold of the pain
Not until they've seen blood
Peppering the ground like a vineyard
And canyons like fireworks
In the air
Not until the ghost of Hiroshima
Haunts their backyards
Not until their souls jump out
of their doors
Not until the streets carpet enemy boots
Not until guns lay in tables with the evening coffee
Not until the television casts a shadow of panic
Not until then, even.
Not until gunpowders fuse in with the uninvolved morning dew
Not until everyone talks about it
Not until expensive towers devalue into rubbles
Not until a dreaded call about the dead stabs a mother's ears
Not until a child becomes an urchin on the streets with no memory of his father
Not until bones break, souls crush under the gripping theatrics of war.
Not until the eyes see what the mind does not believe.
Not until nightmares take shape in stories
And maybe not even then.

It's as if I,
I
Am born with a void
The silence is an invitation
A banquet
Filled with unlit chandeliers
That only I can dance with

Nothing is around except
The grand hall of 'I'
Laid bare like a naked body
Unarmed and yet lethal

Melancholy
Is my infection and sensibility
I rubbled in a cave
When the rest stood on empires

It is a cat and mouse chase
Fooling one that
No one gets eaten
But I,
I will be

It would only take a blink
Before every sadness seeps
In my glass skin
And I am done as a crystal jar

It would only take a fickle sun
Before every wicked order
Rhymeless or not
Claims me with a Judas kiss.

My head is knots on knots
No cheeky red faced scout
Oaths to untangle
Except perhaps
people crazier than I

Sullen as a brick on the wall
Imposed as a figurine doll
The ant-like people
Look on and leave
As if I was a bad show,
Their awareness too
untamed for
my script.

Not Scarlett O' Hara
With lovers on a row
No, no, no mister
I am an antiheroine
Waiting to happen
The world is my stage
Unlike Hamlet certain that
I am going
to be.
 
My wings have
Fallen flat on the
road like gravel
But I make feathers
From leaves people
Leave behind
And sew them
Like stitches in
My spine.

No.
I am not the person
You read in books
with jargons sprawled
Like fancy words only
money could buy.

I am stuck in the walls
Everyone stares when
They get too stuck
With pain and alcohol
Dreamt like hallucinations
Refused like a cul-de-sac

Do not play me
Like a ragged doll
Of your forgotten child
Or a roadside blossom
plucked in fickleness
For I have become
This and that.
This and that.
Over and over
The pawn and
The king
All at once.

I'm crawling like a worm
 in this earthly pain
My face is a river bed,
my eyes a running pool
No wonder I am trying to surface
From torrents I cannot fight
As brave as I want
There are daggers in my blood
They slip out once in awhile
Say hello to me like old
friends from war
Leave me with more shields
Instead of fragments

I shut off the light
 and  feel more alive
Than ever in the dark fields
My home, my sanctuary
My strength, my apathy
When will the stars
Descend to the walls
Grounded as rocks
To your endless beauty?
You are so beautiful
But so terrible
I worship you dead rose
Worship you with wonder
And gravity
Dark, dark the light has left
Left left me
But you have not.
Not you.

Everything can drop
Before me in defeated arms
Like mind leaving in mortality
Like hope dissolving eventually
Not you.
You you you
Not not not
Never, most probably.
Never, most fittingly.
So my dear, veiled flame
Catch-22, alter odyssey
What does this say
About you and me?

You who crossed over
the next decade like a stranger
on slowly familiar lands

No you are not mine to begin with
I merely cut open
Like a surgeon
Only I wasn't saved.

They'll say you tried to ****
me then
What a story
What a cry

The swan song
Plays itself repeatedly
like a haunted rhyme
I am not a listener
I am the orchestrator.

Although I fail to
build from scratch
without reducing
myself to you
or anything at all

Fragility is my downfall
And you know very well
how to shatter.

He was flying
midair like a bird on its
first glide
his wings about
to break
from the current that wanted
to stop him
a sweet sensation in his mouth
about to roll him over,
freedom enslaving his body
Alas!
He went back to the earth
to the ground
to reality so atrocious
only this time with a heartbreaking crash
and crash and crash
and blood and bones separating
soft flesh pulped
muffled voices, shocked riffs hanging
like his vision
his life, his story!

*Oh but that was to be the end of him...

the  death of a bold quest for meaning

As the artist drew his stroke to a stop
As the musician caressed the strings of his guitar
As the poet scoured his mind for a rhyme
As the writer explored the maze of a story

I thought of the countless people
Unable to live as they wished
Perpetually condemned to
Ruin their lives for a slight feel of money
For a chance of survival
Even in the face of false hope

A young boy hauling a package
Heavier than himself
A woman feeding others herself
To feed her family
An old man withered by
Domineering machines and meaningless work
In his entire life

How can life be so funny
And gloomy all the same?
Passion has been gained, all dreams had been lost
If only the world lived a little fairly
If only dreams do not come at that high a price

Mother,
Tell me why people
Hurt each other
Why father tears you apart
Yet you smile in pain

Mother,
Remember the time
When a homeless man
Was a filth
In a woman's eyes?
A curse even in his helplessness?

Mother,
Why do the kids in school
Despise a color?
Is black all that bad?
I happen to like that boy,
why can't they?

Mother,
Why did cousin die
Just because
She wore the wrong clothes
Acted funny
When she was having fun by herself?

Mother,
Why do people hurt each other?
Make me understand
Please,please
My chest feels weird
When I see tears and black and blue
And scars, too
I hate seeing people sad
Don't you hate it too?