I’m painting my love in autumn colors.
I’m painting the flame of leaves underfoot,
The greyish sky, rainy and foggy.
The crying love is a natural mood.

Boarded benches are in the park
Under the shade of naked trees.
And fog is ahead, lots of fog.
My love is hidden in it indeed.

Behind the fog my love is flowing
Inexorably, irrevocably like a water.
It’s running off to nowhere away,
Without a trace forever in autumn.

I smoke my last stick
throughout the night, the smoke fades
Tomorrow, I'll starve.
The damp morning brings wet rice,
jaundiced eyes, and collapsed lungs

The brown water wanes—
Black-head buoys and a poem:
Birds sing elegies.
The sky absolves once again
Amnesia reverberates.

White so pure,
it's cleanliness sure.

Now soaked with dread
and flecked with red.

Heat of me melts into puddle,
my mind will fade and words will muddle.

Steel in chest and searing pain,
my face feels droplets of the winter's rain.

Fur of fire-blackened and bloodied,
as I lay with vision muddied.

No one will come though they look in flocks,
for I am just a simple fox.

another january rain above us,
same month, same city, same conflict,
a different ‘you’ in my poems.

i wonder what you really felt
when you slung my arm over yours,
when you relentlessly chased my hand,
those hard, seasoned fingers on mine.

i try to fight you off, but i wind up
linking our arms in a chain,
rubbing your back until i’m sore,
hearing you ramble in that car ride,
as you asked about my bruises and
searched for my hand before i cut you off,
knowing we cannot be more than this,
at least not now.

that night
when the sky sobbed watching us,
i wished you were drunk every day
and regretted that i was completely sober.

I strive, like raindrops defying the stern gravity,
or like the wearisome erosion of quartz, persistent and silent,
like rainless showers in an overcast winter sky.

Such are the rare shadows of trees in a suffocating, arid city,
akin to the hope of abundant harvests under a relentless drought.

In the waiting for tomorrow, in the rigor of time and inertia of memories,
so brief and eternal like the wandering of a tender memory;
insignificant and perpetual like the queen of the night blooming in the warm darkness,
deep and penetrating like nostalgia itself, echoing in the silence.

while pieces of the rain remains
lost on the leaves – my tears hit the ground
slowly after they have painted my face

still more fragile;
thirsty for water as I keep my eyes open

searching for a picture of you, but the cloud's
tears mix with my own, blurring up my glasses

the sun had peeled away itself
blinded by a shade of heavy clouds – heavy emotions
as emotional as I get when I know you’re so far

it's raining and I need you

The dead woman’s cat in the furrows of the garden
does not let herself be picked up
although hungry and thin after five days
with the dead woman and a night in the rain.
It has gone to join the other feral cats
among the junk behind the house. To be outrageously
******. On my way to work I try to entice it
with false friendship, guilt that the dead woman is dead.

On my way home I buy a can of cat food
but can’t find the cat. I let her go
to her fate. Later that night I try again
but there’s a tom waiting in her place.

Maybe I could have saved her if I’d known
her husband overdosed last week. Just maybe,
no more.
I ask the neighbors what happened to the kid.
The kid lives with her grandparents, they just used her for welfare.

I used to say
Somebody dies every day, it’s normal.
Finding and being found
by a woman, enjoying some romance, having children
and in that context earning a living
which becomes what you say when someone asks
what you do.
Doing something that proves you are alive
since the outcome will so easily be the opposite.
Stay near the earth people
that’s the way to grow old.