Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Được gần cái chết

Được gần cái chết


Thời gian gần đây tôi dành câm lặng,
sự câm lặng sạn lọc,
để gần vào cái chết, nó không thích nghi với tiếng ồn,
dù là tiếng ồn của yêu đương. 

(Lâu dài tôi phát hiện, nó thích đi dạo trong nghĩa trang hơn là dọc bãi biển. Ngôn ngữ, thành tiếng hay không, không là cốt yếu. Nó không nghiêm túc. Ngược lại, nó buồn cười, tất cả đều có thể cười. Nó lười, và dễ tha thứ, vì nó còn phải tha thứ bản thân. Nó keo kiệt từng cử chỉ. Nó thôi phí phạm những nụ hôn. Và nó bắt bạn nhìn nó thật rõ, vì lâu ngày người ta cứ vội sống mà quên nó cũng cần hơi ấm.)

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

a monologue in place of you


nights i keep wanting to stay awake, to anticipate the dreams that may come where you take my hand or i kiss your face and we sit in silence just because i have been craving the smell of you, the feel of you the fact of you like a trip i haven't taken somewhere i haven't been but which i desperately miss, somewhere in an existence that must have been.  and too i want to sleep and dream and be if only briefly the i that needs to be but cannot.  and then mornings i am told you're coming back, come back to the garden where love were sown and stolen, pulled, roots and all during the night who knew who the culprits were they left nothing behind except the space where the kolbaris grew.  and then there's you, babies and moving moving south and west where i want to be you don't even tell me i don't even ask because to know this way is better i remove myself from you for good for real this time. i tell myself let's refuse lets refuse that feeling, what love, don't call it that, let's not overstate, it's just something jungled and jumbled together because you are a moth ball, that's all, you see sit here and drink your tea and look at the sunlight and if you desire close your eyes and dream but don't love, don't love, it will do you no good, i get lost in sunlight did i tell you, it's strange, sunlight so thin and expansive, it forces me towards the emptiness that i work so hard to hide. it reaches out to the waves. i wash my face in it, sink my body into it, float where the waters take me.  i miss you, but don't know how to.  what do i miss if just a memory of what you were? but here we are, i find you again whom i loved but lost and is now strange to me.  where have you been? who have you loved? who has loved you?

i would suggest to myself, maybe love, much differently, will fill in this ghostly space. 
but, let me explain, i feel sick, heavy, wanting
the forbidden, your caress, your maimed hand, your seering eyes, your pocked-wised face, the way you want me, like i have not wanted myself for so long.

but in place of you, i plant tomatoes and broccoli
i run around in the woods.
i read a book over and over again.
i inhale cigarette smoke to fog my lungs when they threaten to collapse from the memory of your scent.
in place of you, i dream.
in place of you i drink and sway my body to a music i can't even hear but don't care so long as there is music and i can dance without you.
even when i stumble and stutter and shut up because it's not you.
that's good enough. yes, that's good enough.