Samaria can burn for all i care.
unchecked **** existed there as well.

each of us is torn.

you dare proclaim: you love me now.
but acts of speech will not belie
your inner need.

i  will  not
return your spineless love
i only see you as you were
passing me
another errant body uninvolved
you haven't changed
your distant eyes avert
your guilt to span the globe
your condescending anger
poorly compensates
your shame

you chose a silence then,
seeing from afar,
you ran and wrote a story
as if my story were a gem
as if your facets claim a right
to make of me a cause

so now i lock you eye to eye.
you owe me nothing,
my pleading done
i'm only here to shout --
to poison what you see as well --
to crack you into seeing hell as hell

sweet weakness soothed you
just for being powerless

while i retched in corners,
alleys, on the train

my captors blinded me
to hide themselves

but you see.
and you flail with understanding,
broken more than me.
you mutter pridefully
you're 'bearing witness'
... but an aperture of musing
only fades into the smoke
you ****
into a screen

regurgitating pity
to be swallowed by your peers,
you have found your hiding spot
in brightness, plugging in

no longer even passing by

this path i wrote
wrought with missed
twists and turns and trip
wires made of pit vipers
camouflaged in ******
stripes the color of bumble
bees that make me sneeze
humbly god help me please
i hear foot steps quietly
lightly on the trail behind me.

r ~ 11/15/14

For the dim regions whence my fathers came
My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.
Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;
My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.
I would go back to darkness and to peace,
But the great western world holds me in fee,
And I may never hope for full release
While to its alien gods I bend my knee.
Something in me is lost, forever lost,
Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,
And I must walk the way of life a ghost
Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;
For I was born, far from my native clime,
Under the white man's menace, out of time.

I sliced a fresh banana today
          alone at my kitchen counter.

I drew a common table knife
         and carved a slender yellow disc
that lingered on the blade.

The next disc drove it off the knife
          and down to the cereal below.  

Soon the banana was all partitioned
          and the Cheerios mostly masked.
I popped the heel in my mouth.

  Childhood memories crackle
          like a radio slightly off its station
                and I can almost hear mom
         talking softly as she slices -

   I am barely listening.
         My left hand holds an imaginary banana
               while my right hand maneuvers
         a non-existent knife.

How strange the knife I held so real
         yet the shade of mom merely conjured -
far too strange to truly believe.

1.

dear feminism,
do i think of women
when i write to you?

why do i personify?

angry at an unjust world,
angry at injustice in ourselves,
have i been taught to fear you?
ignore inequity of fears?

or hide  
in the shadows of your salty curves
speaking soft with sycophantic tilt?

was this what mother meant,
portending talk of therapy
two decades in advance?

a bouy on three waves,
i crash against protuberances too:
limp didactics on avoidance for the victims,
waking in continuums of shrugging crime.

sameness differs in utopias --
every latent gut avers the right to spill.
despite the lissome quell forgetfulness contains,
my proper sphere will leave me
deafened in a wrack-dry
tidal echo--
'Fairness' stains clear beauty dark
as my imagined egos drown at last
from down our oceanic well of shame.

sacrifices fade,
i cannot write...
i write, and fail,
defined by sediment cliche,
reading women authors out of obligation ..odd desire,
and so in dim medieval-fashion
miss
the trail of monoliths erected
for a craven ease

2.

dear civil rights,
why were you taught
through prisms of boredom?
my voiceless reading left you to your rage,
while i communed with glossy nature,
private leaves.

how dare i clap your back
"congratulations"
at your tidy givens  granted
scars were open past my seeing,
and bleed still

while right here, empathy dies, now

dreams are bombed,
grafted to infected faculties
to wallow tended in a garden of injustice
erudite and dead,
i **** a bit i tell myself then stuff my face with food,
cover breath with smoke
and sleep in sour ignorance
no courage left to care.
blind grins bouquet the status quo
of rotted stems, discarded roots

i bury you with homeland fear
the killing silence filled with just intentions
for tomorrow

3.

dear feminism,
you speak for me, too--
my genderless ear attunes

cathartic sweep of ills
scaled beyond your other selves,
sexing into common chosen songs

no fearful tremble
at a mainstream backdrop reprimand--
to be a good gender,
--this gender not that gender--
gestate bigotry of symbol wombs,
cut ripe to cater to unquestioned whim;
no violent selfhood requisitioning
to closet inner innocence in pain

contractions shock in further waves
i midwife simple hope i hope
true fairness you have nursed in seeing death


4.

dear punk **** feminism,
marginal i ask as i perform
unstructured sutras on my heart
exemplar of a meta-freedom
burning in the core of threaded ages strung--
how then life without your voice,
vast silence unobserved,
the hidden anti-*** persisting
in our gender-theory--theorizing sterile norms--
sweet pulsing concupiscence
in our every waking breath
a pollinating zephyr tease toward
celebrating every feotal bathtub bliss --
unbridled ideologies unleashed
unmade into opining din

5.

dear temperance,
i vote you cherished
whirlwind
singing endless through the ageist ridicule
apparent failure in the civil warrior's eye
dogma blinks
denial of the rights you suffered for
but underneath compassion all along
i rally in your family's younger gaze
staring down,
questioning the steady rhythm of a whiskied fist

6.

dear feminism,
have i been taught to celebrate you?
have i been taught to fear for you?
have i been taught to treat you as a woman?
why do i personify you?
like some Sophia cybered up atop the forums of our age

blind and failing
i would be dust as well
like any rightful fading into dust
be swept along with all coercive screenings,
fear-born silences
immune to reason and the reasons of the heart--
rather than to live forgetting
letting go the questions giving rise to equals in a discourse
revising what it means to ask the meaning of


#
dear feminism,

when you are gone..
i for one will sing you
hope

to protest bigotry
a raging tranquil step
of care-filled voicing

dare an upward sloping arc
a dream becoming shared
to overcome
attain
inspired by once unfamiliar names

i will still be here,
the angry feminist
burning in my flagging underwear

brightest outrage at injustice
your deeper loves, fairness
selfhood honored
as if written in the stars
or ancient shorelines
-- you will not be gone

Daybreak
Is a daily baptism:

Small town bubble bursting

At the seams
To find young schoolchildren
Heaving their bags
And heading off to school,

Soft rooster crows
Slowly replaced by the
Smiling whistles
Of traffic guards

Who know each of us
By face.

God
Might move the deadline
For our Chinese script
But I'm still mad at him
For keeping me up
At the grand hour of 11

In the evening graphing
Over (and over)
Again business charts that
Have crooked smiles almost
As blank and bleak

As their returns on investment.

And speaking of which,
This extra eighty grand I spent
At this school, ogling at textbooks I could
Never work up the courage to read,
Is finally starting to break my back.

Weakly, I'll tell you
How much I hate school—
How her consonants sound synonymous
To "scoliosis,"
And peel off my shirt and prove it to you

But that would be careless.

And careless is something in me hand-bound
By iron clad futures and
Graying dreams,
Perhaps that of a dead stock broker
Feet dangling off the roof of
The Philippine Stock Exchange,

And even then that's
Straying too far from home:
A cardboard box business
Resting by a
Tuberculosis-riddled sea.