I am from a rooftop garden
That smell like fresh guavas
And hard, wired fences
Behind which lies a foggy skyline
A dreaming city

I am from a small, brown-red backyard shed
Tucked between rural green fields
Where two little girls defended the world from evil by
Laughing and swinging wildly on a rusted, fluorescent swing set

I am from a row of townhouses
Where no matter how late the return
Warm lights inside glow
Beckoning  

I am from strong rocks
Against which foamy, icy waves crash
Leaving behind grass
Soft to touch  
And hard to uproot

I am from eating overdone fried chicken
From short-lived patience
From a voicemail
That will always say
From Lucy, Tulu and Samah

From don’t eat that, it’s for the guests
And if you have to do it, do it, but I don’t want to hear about it.  

From too many whys
And not enough faith

I am from Dhaka, Bangladesh
From jostling crowds and hearing a million voices outside

I am from Limerick, Ireland.
From rustic houses and quaint parishes

I am from Wallingford, Pennsylvania
From suburbia and inane boredom

From the college-genius who crashed weddings on weekends,
The woman who is still unimpressed by sushi in Japan

I am from feeling sad if you do
But wanting to make you laugh anyway

We are the ones
who sit behind
clouds and mist
Fallen
Left
Trodden.

It's our skin, you explain,
it remembers every touch,
glance, action and dance

We are etched on
by our actions.

A tapestry of life
Illuminated on us.

Immigrants, especially those who don't return,
create idealistic homelands.
They imagine that all their
Woes, hurts and indignities
Would not exist
in their imagined homeland.

In their minds, homeland
is in stasis.
The life they left is lingering
waiting for them to return.

They cast winter upon the ponds of their
homelands
And live lives skating over the surface
Each time coming closer to
shattering the illusion
and gasping
in the icy
waters
of change.

The problem with being 18 is
simple.
The thing is we feel too much,
too deeply, too suddenly.

Our anger is an earth-splitting motion,
Sadness a thousand and one rain
clouds dragging down
And happiness is the flight of the
new born bird
Love is the wonder of finding
a buried Easter egg.

Each day, anger strikes, sadness
rains and, on good days,
love rebuilds.

We live on shorelines ravaged
Daily and salvage
fiercely.

We live in fear
Of handshakes, of smiles, of
any sort of legal situation.

To us, then, books like
Franzen's Corrections are
revelations.

They are portals into this other world,
Of our neighbours, of our bosses
and, of course,
of those ever-perplexing PTA members.

He did it out of a swamping sense
Of obligation

He did it because if no one else
Was going to do it.

He did it because he had been
Doing it.

Sometimes that was just
enough to keep
going.

Sometimes he wondered
If others thought why.

If they too got lost
looking for an answer that
Felt did not exist.

Truth?
He did it because
He was scared
to stop.

Taking two sloping steps at a time
I hurried toward the gray peak
As if propelled by some Pied Piper’s rhyme
Between the battering of the wave’s break
On the smooth gray stones
Laid out as some colossal creatures bones

Near the top there lay
An ancient castle of pride and age
Shining under a single sun’s ray
Copied out of a fairytale page
Around it, the grass waved
Like sports fans after some fantastic goal was saved.

Nestled against the castle’s topmost crook
A fiddler sat upright and played
His music notes traveled and shook
Through the crowded masquerade
Of tourist’s gasps, native rough accents
Dominating the soundsphere without any assistance

They waltzed around in the air
Only to be carried away by a vicious banshee wind
Leaving me momentarily bare
A noiseless kind of blind
As I stared out in the distance
Watching the cliff be beaten out of existence