within thy white
thy flesh hath fold,
where fingereds tight
and girl is told.

i am
(after all)
alive in you

                       this day .

the soft brushing,
the course fiber,
the flaxen hair.

i kiss you smally.

you do not stir
more than a pale breath
around your nostrils.

my son is inside you.

i will always love you.


(...sleep)

A trickle of time
melts its way down
a mountain of perhaps.
Other trickles
from others' potentials
merge and mingle;
become a stream
which grows as it gathers.
Soon, soon,
time no longer
is guided by stone
but carves it,
carves unwilling rock
into fissures.
Earth itself is rent
by what might have been;
time gathers the debris
and carries it downstream,
deep and slow and wide.
The canyon it cut
is deep and wide as well,
and twists and turns
with branches and dead ends.
Our lives are but a shout into the void,
echoes which carry and fade
along canyon walls,
unless and until
an ear downstream
might hear them.
Perhaps they will;
perhaps not.
The river and canyon both
are fickle;
hold their secrets close.
The only potential
once here

is to shout
until no voice is left.

you asked me if i
thought it hurt when
icarus threw himself into the
sun

i didn't have the heart to
tell you how the story ended
how he woke up in a burn
ward

how he flipped a coin
heads or tails and when
it came up daedalus was still
dead

you can romanticize it all you
want but we all know who's
who in this metaphor and how
sweet

it will feel when you incinerate
me i promise when i wake up
wherever that is i'll still write you
psalms

it's hard to believe
the earth was ever
dry

it has been [43] days since i missed a dose
of you
             strange to think
                                         that you have always choked
on me

the bus is a slow
revolving door and i am
its penultimate

Some weeks after they shot
my father in the face
and my mother in her stomach,
I could feel the joints
of my bones, the ***** popping
in the loose sockets,
all pain, like the ****** of nails,
their rusting in friction.
The same anorexia could be
seen on the scrawny
gait of our dog that had already
forgotten the taste
of fish heads my father grilled
on coconut charcoal,
my mother stewed in vinegar
or I deep-fried to crisp.
Gray, his foreign name, barked
before dashing out
towards the avocado tree not yet
in season, a collision
between a hardwood and a skull,
his body on the ground,
the dimming gaze a quiet begging,
his nod letting me live.