3am cravings

Chased out of sleep by restless dreams
(I'm staring at a gaping wound pulsating on my head),
I wake up hungry, impatient.
I rummage through the refrigerator looking for some ready-made food, 

a left over pizza slice from Costco. Unsatisfied, I begin making dinner. 

I think about going back to bed.
I think about reaching over
your side of the bed,
pull myself close.
Out of habit, I kiss your back and
sleepily
leave my lips there.

The children will wake soon,
but there's still plenty of time
to cut the vegetables, soak the noodles, roast the onion and ginger,
start the broth. Even time
to brush my teeth again and read a poem.

(Sept 20, 2017. For B.)

It is done

It is done.
This life is done.
You don’t need to worry anymore,
though she is your life.
I know.
With her you’d tasted homemade apple pie
and fresh okra from the garden.
With her too, you saw sunflowers hung
heavy with seeds,
firm yellow petals radiant even at dusk,
how you imagined love
to be.

I know.
With her you’d found your burial ground,
finally stopped searching for your birthplace,
laid down your loneliness,
like a child waiting for
his mother’s return
for so long no one came except night
wailing
long and deep.

I know.

I know you worry,
but she will be fine.
She will find a way to change the light bulb. She will pay the bills on time.
She will know what to do with your books.
She will get help cleaning the house.
She will make it to the doctor’s office.
She will go to sleep and wake up on your side of the bed. She will sometimes
forget what day it is, but she will remember that she has a hair appointment.
She will laugh and tell stories about you, her witty, charming Abe.
She will grieve heavily,
and she will be beautiful,
because you are beautiful—
you and her,
this life,
apart and together,
in love and death,
are beautiful.

(In memory of Mr B.)
10/1/18

afternoon nostalgia

#21

Is the dogwood tree in the backyard blooming 

Like I imagine it would? 

Is the bougainvillea vine 

carpeting the front yard with valiant 

dead 

red 

blossoms?  

In my memory, they are fierce. 

Towards the end of March

Date: in the middle of March


Plan:
each day I will gather
something beautiful for you.


Because:
between words there is distance.
It teaches me patience.
You teach me the difference.




Date: towards the end of March
To remember, I drink and dance
naked by an open window--I want
to display myself to the world.
And why not?
Am I not beautiful?
You've told me so.

Advance Directive is romantic

(#17)




The next time we meet, it will be at my funeral.
You should not be sad.
Say no eulogy.
I will have lived fully by then.
I will have loved generously.
I will have been fearless and kind.
I will have laughed unashamed and naked in the sun
and cried with the loneliest.
I will have fixed some broken things,
fed and sheltered, sowed and re-sowed, created and colored,
wrote some poems, and many times wandered
through rain soaked streets and forests
bursting green.
I will have been satisfied.

Don't even talk about the past. You will not know
anyone there.
Walk by my body silently, look at me.
Look at my hands and remember
how they touched your face,
caressed your body, held your head.
Look at my painted face and imagine
petals on my lips.
Remember the way I loved and let your heart swell
knowing you have partaken in it.
Drive with the others to the cemetery.
Throw bougainvillea down my grave.
Make sure flowers cover me
before the first fistful of dirt.

When all is gone, you stay.
By my grave, tell me slowly
stories of how you've loved
since I left.
And when the gravedigger comes back with his shovel,
you can go.

Songs in transit

Songs in transit: coming
3.4.17

I am coming back
to that place on the hill
far from the city where my lovers lie,
where I planted pieces of myself, like a garden bed
it has since grown
a different bush.

Songs in transit: en route to Oakland

In this circus country, truths

are whatever magic tricks you conjure
and language
is made

to jump hoops and juggle
balls.
You and I do not belong here.
We prefer magic without tricks.

Songs in transit: Reading 100 Love Sonnets on the plane

“Love, what a long way, to arrive at a kiss,
What loneliness-in-motion, toward your company.”
This is the second love sonnet of a hundred
Pablo Neruda wrote for his third wife.
He wrote from another country, another time,
but today,
across grasslands and north to the Rockies, he speaks
as if to say he hears me, and knows
where I am going
what I seek.
Even if I do not know them, there have always been
fools like me--
we love with willful stubbornness
because we are its progeny.


Songs in transit: this is a different body

So I come back to you--
not to the place where love happened and is gone,
where now another woman goes--no
I come back to you
anew,
a different body,
through a different door,
a different bed.
In this new place, words stay.
Touch imprints. Movements happen without noise.
Bound and shelved above our heads, pleasure
is broken down to its simplest sounds, slick and wet 
like waves.
I come back to you thicker. Nimbler.
My tongue quicker, I move slow.
Time has made me a generous lover.
For this you are both glad
and afraid.

Songs in transit: panic

3.5.17

 “There are many ways to carry the past with us.”

This I read at the bookstore

to stop the panic rising.

Songs in transit: leaving

3.6.17

I leave the key on the desk and close the door,
It is not night time, but darkness lingers.
Inside someone’s kitchen, a light is turned on.  
Perhaps an exchange of a sleepy morning kiss.
Over on the next block, Bica's coffee is opening for customers
shuffling to get somewhere
then later, to come back home.

I pull my luggage past them in the rain.
I would have gladly sat down on one of those chairs
and never get up.
But I have to catch the train
back to the city where I was born
and every day
is dying.

At the Rockridge station I get on the 6:25AM train to the airport.

It is crowded. No one talks.
We are too sleepy, too sad,
we don’t want to disrupt this kinetic energy
lulling and moving our weights forward.  

The train hums louder as it dives

into the dark underground beneath the waters of the bay,
the way my mother sang to us
when we were young and afraid of the dark--
I closed my eyes and traveled with the train
back to my mother's womb--
wet and sleepy and content.
But I have to exit soon, and the train knows.
It cradles me for as long as it can, before I am expunged,
forced to look at daylight again—
this is life.
And love is no exception.

Songs in transit: when there is no return 

Where love is born, it can also die—

this is the process.
I know.

Because love is a constant
object in motion,  it leaves
in order to come back;

without return, it is lost.
The hills of Oakland know this.

If each time we love
a little shorter,
a little less kind,
give less of ourselves,
touch not frequently,
look not too long
and don’t whisper with new awe each morning we get to wake together—
it won't come back. 

Songs in transit: I arrived but not yet home

Last night I heard the hills cry.

They felt love wander and feared it lost.
They swelled with sadness, soaked the streets.
This morning they refused to wake,
Leaving rain to say goodbye.

Rain walked me to the train.

Rain stroked my hair.
Rain wrapped its gusty arms to hug me;
I breathed in its Patagonia mountain air,
filled my lungs with abundant space--
keep my feet light.

I took it with me on the plane.

It sat next to me on the bus.
It unlocked the door and walked inside.
It saw me undress and covered me as I lie down.
Then it left me there,
in the city where I was born
and every day
is dying.

Teach me how to not despair

(for my children. for r and his.)

Teach me how to not despair.

Remind me again

that life is a series of mathematical

errors

and all I have to do is find y.

I already have paper and pen.

I can

turn numbers into stories

stories into actions

actions into hope

hope to love

and live

kindly.

Sit with me,

in the high noon glare,

our bodies warm from sun heated rocks

beneath, watch me unravel the mystery of an equation,

with child-sized amazement duplicating,

quadruplicating, octuplicating, doubling

ceaselessly

into the distances of my imagination.

And when I cannot find my way,

teach me to trust

that inside each problem

already is the answer

I seek.

2/3/17

Last Sunday I went to a funeral

Last Sunday I went to a funeral.
Q had died in her chair,
looking out her window.
Father Keith gave the eulogy.
He said, "I knew her for many years. She loved to sit
by that window, waiting
for the day to pass.
He paused, then said, "It is with amazing grace
that we may last the length of days.
For this we should give thanks."

Does he know
the insufferable ways in which days
go on and on?

I will give no thanks
to the length of days
I endured.

I will lay face down
deep in dirt and weep
for the 13 Sundays that have passed
without me.

There is a woman waiting.
There is a woman wanting.
She died with that waiting.

if you must be silent

Love, do not call to me.
Do not say to me the feelings that vex your heart at night
when you miss me most
half asleep and half drunk,
only when light breaks make silence your armor,
and sentiments harden like laid bricks baked in the sun.

If you must be silent, be silent
all the days.
Be more silent than night.
More than a muted cry.
Aimless wandering.
Hurt gone numb.

Love, if you must
be silent.

Listen, remember

Listen, remember that night
we didn't fuck because
goodbye was too sad and we didn't know
how to fuck sadly. Instead
we sang lullabies off key
and giggled.

It was stupid.

10.2.16

Not for you

I miss you--
this is not for you to read.
Neither is I love you.
These words are for me
and the morning,
to whisper in my bed
where I refuse
to get up,
but the sun keeps on
sending heat up my legs
my belly
my breasts--
I feel it breathing
across my collar bones-
I open my eyes to scold the light.
I wont acquiesce.
I will not
let quiet bully me.
I miss you, I repeat,
not for you to read
but for me to whisper with morning
in my bed.


10.2.16

Goodbye 3 Love letter to the bougainvillea vine

8.9.16
R.


In April I first saw you,
you've just begun to bloom
red blossoms.
I fell in love with that early Oakland morning
between the green doors and white garden gate
you waited, as if you have always been waiting
for me. My excitement grew
with you against the wall,
it began to take up space.
I pulled petals from the vine,
kept them hidden in my books,
pieces of you everywhere-
life is beautiful and gracious
again.



And now I am gone.
I won't be back.
I won't caress you
in front of those green doors
behind that white garden gate.
I won't kiss your fiery flowers
or taken breathless under your tendril grip,
 stand for hours as you climb with the Oakland sun
stroking my back.
I am gone.
I did not say goodbye.
I'm sorry, beautiful tensile bougainvillea vine.

Goodbye 2 sadness is a sedative

8.7.16

R,
Sadness is a sedative,
like the hot afternoon sun of your somnolent childhood-
remember that languorous  lullaby?
a sleep aid
for those restless thoughts that won't lie down,
it will help you sleep,
no need to answer
no need to speak
no need to open
no need to close
no need of words
no need for touch
even your own
just stuporous slumber
until it's done.
Doesn't that sound nice
then emptiness will cease to be
a word,
you, and, or, I.

Goodbye 1

8.7.16

R,

When I don't have us to protect me
from myself
When you have taken your arms away
I feel on my chest the weight
of your absence
This is grief.

I put myself

-for R.

I put myself there with you,

between pauses on still surface, 

where sky and water hold each other.

I put myself there in the mornings
on that bed where you lie,
where I pressed our bodies close

until we couldn't tell which is sky and which is water.
You kissed me and looked outside--
morning seems pale, you said, 

as if it hadn't seen much sleep.
Lucky morning, I said.

I want to smell the sweet late night whiskey on your breath,
taste your face,
like the sun rising from between my legs,
your nose and lips wet in the glistening of my dew.


I put myself in that house, naked by the door-windows,
their parted curtains open
to a carpet of bruised camellias. 

I put myself on that balcony reaching towards the dogwood tree.
In the spring it will bloom 
pink curvy blossoms 
for us to kiss. 

I put myself by that garden gate,
on that stone path to that bougainvillea vine. 

I want to fuck by that bougainvillea vine.
So I put myself on a bed of translucent petals,
crawling to gather them in, because I love them,
and you, in all my naked beauty, could not resist.
I won't let you resist.

I put myself with your body-
your eyes, your lips, your fingers-
my body in your body- 
my eyes in your eyes my lips on your lips my fingers
where your fingers have been my mouth my face my pussy your cock - 
I put myself in that emptiness without you, 
my darling.


-6.13.16

These misrecognitions keep on happening

Misrecognition #1
The body as love.
I saw the body by itself
and thought it was love,
but years later, I found
Pain is not just visceral,
and the body only
is lonely. Pain came back.


Misrecognition #2
This time the body was dismissed.
Instead I waited for words
and the bodies of texts.
Love was a book--
many books, and my body was one--
opened and flipped through--
perused. Pain grew large.


Misrecognition #3
I dismissed both the body and the book.
I touched without reading,
but my body knew. it recognized
absence, and it rebelled. Pain was somatic--dull and constant.
all I could do was keep my mouth open until
Pain can hear itself deep within
pauses between breaths.

Misrecognition #4
The body is sculpted (in fact, it sculpts itself.)


Misrecognition #5
To know, you cannot feel. (in fact, to feel is ancient knowledge that came before thought; it is old as love is old and does not doubt itself.)


This is the truth:
Pain is itself desirable.

This night

Darkness hides its face
in cigarette smoke and wind.

At the station
the dog and I sit, waiting;
the dog yawns
and I open my mouth--
we swallow the night.

I can't remember

She called you little baby
You named her your buttinsky
She said I love you
You said I need you
You said I'm eating whipped cream to fight the loneliness, want to
come over? want to
sleep over? I need you
I need you
I need you
I need you
She asked do I have to wear clothes?
You said no.

The picture you texted me that night,
the picture of your face
that I love, that I said Aww, hello there love I miss you
she must have read my mind
because she, too, she said, Aww, hello handsome I miss you.

And I cant remember
if hearts break
from hypertrophy or fail
because they are weak.


(11.28.15)

I miss you here

I miss you here, you
a thousand shards of light,
while I bottle up rainbows--
the energy condensed will explode
---

your love is a windup clock,
I turn the gears, synchronize
my needs with your highs,
curb my cries on your lows
-----

when your drink is bourbon on ice,
my drink is your coming
and leaving

me
to silence.


(anodyne 10/25)

promise of the end

I would like to welcome death,

hang a banner on my door,

prepare a feast,

write a poem

for an old friend whose forgiveness I seek.

But I am afraid to tell you,

afraid that you will be afraid

to see the gentle promise
that death brings.

Because I can love you

and leave you at the same time,

this life in which I do not fit
 there isn't enough time

to dig up all the dirt in my garden
to pay back the debts I owe,
the loves I needed and destroyed
the bodies I touched and breathed in and touched and breathed in again every time
 I work my fingers deep into the earth,
this life of coming
                               and
                                            going.

what's wrong with leaving
this world

at once too much and insignificant?

I leave it each morning

I get to wake up with you,

each night with the cool breeze moving
through the windows,
 across a sky so dark space

is just the beginning,
what a relief
when time stops counting in days
stops being lost or wasted
on measures of things.
instead it just is. and I just am
together we exist until
we don't. that is death's gentle
promise.