It was a hot, sunny, summery day, and the fire trees were in bloom. Their red leaves littered the streets with sunset though the midday light cast contrast on every little awning and ledge.

You were hanging out by the Big Brother store, talking to the friendliest shopkeeper I ever knew, drinking soda and listening to his stories.

From far away I thought you were a boy; your hair was cut so short. It was the first time I ever saw a girl without long hair, and ordinarily I would have been curious, but I had other problems, as you knew. As my little feet marched closer to the store I saw (though I tried to keep my head down) your face, which was so pretty with your huge luminous eyes and your fair soft skin.

I was twelve back then, though, and so were you, so those weren't exactly the things on my mind as I reached the awning of the store, facing the storekeeper and trying my best to get it over with. I was disappointed because you were there; that there was another person to see me. I was even more shy back then than I am now.

I must have made quite the curious first impression on you, huh?

As I said, it was a hot summer's day, and the sky was robin's egg blue, and there I was beside you, about to purchase some juice and biscuits.

And I was soaking wet with water.

My hair and my clothes were heavy and dark and drooping, as if I had just been submerged in a river with all my clothes on. A trail of tiny blue puddles followed me from the gate of our house to where I was, where a big puddle was forming under my feet. I was frowning.

You just stared at me with wide eyes as I told the shopkeeper what I was going to buy. Straight to the point. Oh, and back then I couldn't speak Filipino very well, and so my words had an outlandishly English accent. The friendly shopkeeper was used to it, but you definitely didn't hear me speak Filipino every day. He didn't even ask me why I was giving birth to puddles. He was cool like that.

He handed me the juice and the biscuits. Great. I could splosh back home. But I hazarded to look at you, so ever so shyly I turned my head to look and remember who it was that saw me so I could avoid her.

Then oh man, I blushed. I didn't know you were that pretty with your short hair and your wide eyes and your fair skin.

I'll never forget it; how right then and there you lost it. All this time you were biting your lip while watching me, but then you just giggled and laughed and bent over and laughed some more. I was so embarrassed, but now as I sit remembering that moment, I realise how happy and innocent your laugh was.

Then I made like a dish with a spoon and ran away in a blush as red as the fire trees. I hoped I would never see you again, but of course I did.

I did, sometime later, when we were older, and I remembered you. You didn't let off that you remembered me from sometime past, but I couldn't miss the way you half-smiled and held back a chuckle after you studied my older face.

I never did tell you why I was dripping that day. You never asked. You're cool like that. I swear though, that someday when we meet again I'll tell you, but for now it's my little secret, and you'll be the first to know.

And oh how I was in love with you and, I think, always will be.

I'm deteriorating,
Slowly fading to black
I'm barely out the gates
Yet I feel like a weather beaten hack

What's the point to life?
With its fake friends, fake smiles and lost dreams
I look around me and my shoulders sag
This is not the stuff of boyhood dreams

What's the point to life?
A ferocious cycle of failure and heartbreak
What's my greatest fear?
Unfulfilled potential and lost stakes

I shouldn't be feeling like this
but at twenty I've got so much hanging on me
Prematurely coming of age
Midwifed by letdowns and rookie mistakes

But they don't know, they cant see
Hazarded guesses is all they can take
At the turmoil and torment
I mask with wide smile and firm handshake

I'm a man, I've got to be strong
Bear the consequences of my past
You don't know and you never will
A jot of the pain I hold fast

The way of my parents seems right
But putting all my eggs in one basket
Is not a smart move I don't think
Christianity my have some answers, but cant crack the whole racket

Himself it was who wrote
His rank, and quartered his own coat.
There is no king nor sovereign state
That can fix a hero's rate;
Each to all is venerable,
Cap-a-pie invulnerable,
Until he write, where all eyes rest,
Slave or master on his breast.

I saw men go up and down
In the country and the town,
With this prayer upon their neck,
"Judgment and a judge we seek."
Not to monarchs they repair,
Nor to learned jurist's chair,
But they hurry to their peers,
To their kinsfolk and their dears,
Louder than with speech they pray,
What am I? companion; say.
And the friend not hesitates
To assign just place and mates,
Answers not in word or letter,
Yet is understood the better;—
Is to his friend a looking-glass,
Reflects his figure that doth pass.
Every wayfarer he meets
What himself declared, repeats;
What himself confessed, records;
Sentences him in his words,
The form is his own corporal form,
And his thought the penal worm.

Yet shine for ever ****** minds,
Loved by stars and purest winds,
Which, o'er passion throned sedate,
Have not hazarded their state,
Disconcert the searching spy,
Rendering to a curious eye
The durance of a granite ledge
To those who gaze from the sea's edge.
It is there for benefit,
It is there for purging light,
There for purifying storms,
And its depths reflect all forms;
It cannot parley with the mean,
Pure by impure is not seen.
For there's no sequestered grot,
Lone mountain tam, or isle forgot,
But justice journeying in the sphere
Daily stoops to harbor there.

BEHOLD A PALE HORSE
Recall-quietly-the-hazy-days-where-I-didn’t-know-poisonous-­berries-from-safe-ones.....
I hazarded a climb up the tallest tree
the ascent was genuflected as I recall.
The grove was perfect in its equanimity,
forcing my gaze to rest upon a single silver stallion.
For hours I watched

Oh, Primeval Traveler,
with your triumphant mane, silvered across horizon
echoing the lunar eclipse in your brilliance,
your muscles reminiscent of an anti-apocryphal steed
It’s flow showed the authenticity of nature
Here life proudly declared
Movement & Peace
And each of it’s components perfectly crafted in the Cosmic Forge
Look how its luminescent power survives the darkness
I thought this until a neural feedback loop formed,

“This is the beast that would have pulled Arjuna forth unto battle
As Krishna directed him in his dharma as a secondary event
to the arrival of natural perfection.”

As the day past to night,
the night brought forth darkness
And in the darkness I recognized a primal need of my own.
To evacuate all of the grunginess I felt brewing within my body.
I resolved the anguish in a moment of perfection.
A loss of self catalyzed through the release of wasted being
And I recall that as I came back into my being
the horse who had been so distant and yet so near
the one who I had borne divine witness to
galloped full stride in the trajectory of my lofty dwelling
As it passed under me
It......s.tum.-b.led-------->(^)ooooo,,,o,o,o,o,o,o,o,o,oo,0.

Through the most polluted of rancid berry waste I have ever let go of.
Its mane plastered to its leathery skin by my own liquid adhesive
It lay there
dying and breathless
among the wasteland, which came so inevitably from my bowels
now a haven for insects nestled and rotten, a temple of the naturally begotten child of life named “death,”
Or rather an impromptu and particularly gothic grave of a God who has received no worship and is now forgotten.

Not another pie in the sky, he said over breakfast, busting my bubble, cutting my legs off. It won't work, he said, pointing at the job section in the newspaper. You've got to grow up, he said, dissing months of sweat and toil. True, this wasn't my first pie in the sky, but it was the meatiest by far, not weak and watery as he hazarded. Without it, I would have keeled over in the ditch many moons ago, it's sustenance plunk plain enough to dunk me in luminous lucidity, spilling itself all over the breakfast table.... like it or loathe it, I am my sweetest pie in the sky, my wildest dream. And my waters have just broken.

It is that time
for lines
of words
to audition

in imaginary
stanzas
and couplets

these lines
and the unhappy
neurons
that hazarded them

crushed
like an off color
rebellion
if off color is still

crumbs I am
going for
granules
of forward

I'm inadequate
for your purposes
Maybe even
for the overwhelming
majority of purposes
I am a hazarded key
for a suspected lock
securing maybe