i heard another person in my village
died today, we didn’t dare touch
the body, his organs had bled out

there are no white people here
white as ghosts, they are going home
my friends in America tell me
we are not on the news, only Jewish
people fighting muslims, but

don’t they know we all come from Africa?
i heard the super-nationals took this
virus into a lab and created a way

to rid itself of the old people of civilization
if Ebola spreads maybe the world
will not remember what it means
to come from tribes that your mother came from
once, we left Africa and now we leave her

to her misery, well you know what
maybe fiscal ebola is just around the corner
for people who live in America, people

who live their lives on debt, credit, profiting
from heatlh insurance, death insurance, the works
but the fact is, I don’t think this is going away
I think Ebola is here for a very specific reason
The world is ready for another plague

to hemorrhage like a zombie, it’s not news?
not if you are black, if your body fluids
don’t stain your white skin, not when
it’s on another continent, that you don’t have
relatives in, don’t call it a “black death”

just because it originates in bats from Africa
there isn't a vaccine because the world
intentionally doesn’t wish for our well-being
you say it isn’t airborne, it doesn’t spread easily
because we are somehow *****, and you are clean
because you are somehow rich, compared to our poverty?

i

Love is like a foreign language
once you hear it, you want to hear it more
speak it without it sounding alien
though she will behave here

as in a schoolbook for a foreign language
where we are all beginners
all sometimes say ***** words

ii

Without meaning to, she reaps
She sleeps, she washes, she softens
to its touch because it was made for her
like attachment, and for him like pleasure

love has no vowels, no translations, no silence
only a universal physicality and spirituality
that makes you have no defenses, you

iii

Trying not to love doesn’t bring you anywhere
it’s creative to let her use you
she is the last refugee and the first politics
she comes back in the evening when

your world is torn upside down with bills
it’s love that cooks for you darling
she whispers to you, “I’m taking you home”.

I’m the captured poet of dream
a Ferris wheel author of
haunted Sioux transcendence-miracles

an alchemist of language
maybe the last poet of epiphanies
that dance like a silent water-tanka
the fire-rain-truth shouts inside of me

like a poet that navigates the overmind
a benevolent alien collective-mind
an indecipherable dialogue of

darling insomnia divinity and
fantasy-starved and sun-quilted
ambrosia, my lungs filled
with the promise of the cosmos

come to life in majestic verse
behind blindfolds of invisible offerings
resigned to the hypothetical
responsibility of mediumship.

I don’t know the etiquette
of how eyes meet or for the first time
if they sparkle especially or

if I wore glasses the first time we met
I know I saw you with my intrinsic
looking as if I could pierce
your inner beauty, nor am I biased

I don’t know the business of eyes
beauty has been so over-rated
for so long, thanks to an evolution

but I know the last time
I look inside my heart, you’ll be there
with Asian eyes as deep as
India, China, Japan, Korea

so distinct like laughter of another culture
i don’t know the etiquette of eyes
but mine are drunk brown

not twin-cold blue or milk of salt
but chesnut-star, desire with the tip
of reaching across the universe.

All these stanzas look alike
they talk about the same things
with the same words, the same poem

written over and over again
like voices, whispers, copying each other
unable to feel and trust experience
differently, socialized for homogeneity

unified but dull, strong but obedient
their writing seemed the narratives
of machines unable to innovate

plagiarizing voices they believed were
their own, authentic, pure
their literary journals were a politics
of masters of arts and agendas of contests

like car commercials without a proper
enjoyment of speed, or our favorite writers
whose names we only knew because

they were the ones who died at the right time
while somebody was looking, reading them
but the bookstores didn’t know their
metaphors were weak, or their life’s work

was merely symbolic, that’s the thing isn’t it
poets are only symbols, as poems are only
fluff, paper, the labor of writers-in-residence

while the rest of the world are more
interested in serial killers and which stocks
might be worth getting into, and when to sell out
investing in words seemed silly to them

and, in my selected works there was nothing
of how to be a Poet Laureate or how to win prizes
exceptional or not, publication was left to amazon

state grants, fellowships, visiting writers
academics who never felt truly how to write
poetry at its heart was a colonization of artists
few could share what that meant, we were

the first illiterate generation, spending more time
with the internet than with books.

Ebola, coming from the Continent of our roots
The WHO is exhausted by your contagion
Nurses are leaving their posts, doctors are dying

What can contain exponential growth?
Not the money and debts of this bankrupt America
We print more money and expect
The world to stay the same, but it won’t
Not after you Ebola, a profit mechanism

Vaccines, for each strain and mutation?
Ebola, your incubation period is too long
Your death-conformity is too high

How can you possibly be natural?
Man-made, racially biased, targeting
The weak, the poor, the masses
Ebola, a colonial rampage in your DNA
I call your bluff, genocide, Genocide!

Obama doesn’t mind Ebola, flights stay open
New epicenters for outbreaks arrive
The pundits say it’s already too late

Fluids or air-droplets, both, who is to say?
The CDC seems strangely apathetic
The UN is oddly apologetic
Ebola, are you ready to decimate
The white man, as you have the black?

i

My ugly love, when you are so beautiful
to me it’s not enough for my mouth
whose kisses routinely bathe you

in an inventory of whispers, love-cries
with tenderness for however long
nature allows, you allow, fate allows
flower by flower, I would choose you
again and again, my loving angel

ii

Your body’s fragrance is my
shadow’s energy, your humid flesh
the channel of my dreams

if also for our child, who forgot to incarnate?
my truthful love, so sincere and honest
with armpits like the smell of wheat
and ******* as impetuous as a stormy sea
and eyes like wildfire, cutting me

iii

Into sweet obedience, I could not imagine
that I could have built a house of
sweetness without your splendor

and how you love cherries, your cheeks
an Asian wispy elven secret of youth
my soul-engaging love, I have to remind myself
we are getting older together in
beloved months, we sometimes forget the details

iv

Of why nothing mattered or had a name
except each other, we were made for this
an alchemy of spirits, while our shared beauty

allowed us to endure poverty
with gifts as plentiful as sparking
moments of gratitude that went on forever
like lessons learned from wise calming friends
and lovers that felt like they were

v

Gifts from the gods, plump-wide-eyed
spiritual dreams of some strange mineral belonging
we walk naked through the golden church

of our earthy love, as if we learned to be
one body, one shared soul wearing
clothes of separate bodies, laughing minds.