Monsoons

There is no autumn in these islands.
There is no excuse to wear sweaters and scarves
and to hide against our skin the fact that it needs to be wet
and warm and touched. There is no wind that will stir
the crowded lines of people to life, to make them
shiver against each other in the knowledge
that they are not alone. There are no streetlights flickering
underneath the approaching chill and no damp breezes
that make you blow into your hands, his hands,
her hands — no excuse to be romantic.
Because autumn romances need autumns,
and autumns need more than what these islands,
with our monsoon rains and sky-blue seas and year-long summers,
can offer. There is no autumn in these islands.
There is only the sun and the sheen of sweat it drapes
over the nape of her neck. Only his sticky hands
as he guides you in and out of a side-street.
Only the damp corners of your bumping elbows.
There is no autumn in these islands, but the humidity
can choke you up as well as your feelings.
There is no autumn in these islands.
There is love, only it needs no excuse.

Parable of the T-Shirt

There is a perfectly functional shirt in my cabinet, never worn. It’s an undecided shade of violet but a hundred percent cotton. I’ve had it for years now; taking it out makes me think of the last orphan in every line that orhpanages have organized over the years, whenever shiny, prospective parents come to call. There’s nothing wrong with the child, and certainly nothing wrong with the shirt – maybe a bit scrubbed over here, longer arms than most, a goose-like neck that hints at good-natured desperation. I guess it’s because the world doesn’t like to see anyone try that hard, so that shirt is a bit under-worn. The world, instead, worships nonchalance, notices the rebellious, dotes upon those who can sign and scream in histrionic tandem. And the last child is cleanest but always get skipped and the shirt is on top of the pile and no one has ever had to search for it. Parents adopt the brats; I wear shirts that you have to extract from a mess.

On a Saturday afternoon, I decide to pull it out and cut it up. I snip angles off, make turns in the neckline. The sleeves get cuffed. I use a blue green thread to tie everything together, and even from a distance the shirt looks like a disaster. And I know now that finally, the world will look at it. I will wear it. I will begin to pull it out of the tangle of other similarly unconventional t-shirts, wear it like a thing of novelty, dress it up with dedication. Because the only reason you have to search for those things in the first place, is because none of them are distinguishable from each other. In the end they all look – despite their best, artful, energetic efforts – alike.

From All Poets to All of Chemistry

And this is how it’s always going to go:
you will be more precious than most things.
You will be my Sun and my understanding
will hold like wax feathers against the force of your brightness.
You will be incredible beyond belief
and I will be mystified by you. You will be the abandoned playground
I will keep looking back behind my shoulder at;
like a shadow in the forest when the fugitive flees,
like a slap of soles on a concrete walk,
the kind that can only be made by invisible bullies.
What can I do to stave off my own bewilderment?
How can I hold off something as persistent as fear?
I do not know how to not be afraid of you and what you can do,
how to not be as confused by you as I am.
What you must allow yourself to mean
to so many other unsuspecting individuals like myself.

And then again you are like the sunset, in the scenery
where I have seas, oceans, a whole continent of sand before me —
as inescapable as the future, as impossible to touch as space.
I can only sigh in wonder when I behold you from afar.
Up close — and I will probably stutter.
You are more intricate than you have any right to be,
and here I am reduced to so many words
in an attempt to justify my feelings for you.
What can I say? That I love you
but I am not the best one to love you?
That I love you only as far as you confuse me?
That I love you and I will toil after this love,
long after I have exhausted myself, long after the love
has turned bitter and bland, long after I realize
that my passion is borne out of fear?
How do I love you, when I must know it,
when I am sure of it, when I see it as clearly as fact —
that it is not love that you need?

Here are some verses about you. Here are some words about you.
Perhaps this is not your language
but I do not know how else to feel for you, to react to you,
other than to rouse up a couple of sentiments that will prove
ultimately pointless. It is incredible – both the depth of my feelings
and their ineffectuality.

Just the words of an artist for science.  

Love.  I know you will never read this.

Smile, It’s Your Self-concept

I.

Beethoven usually plays in my dream sequences.
The tragedy hangs loosely around the edges of things;
the word ominous comes to my mind.
There are shadowed corridors,
spider webs, and of course the floor creaks.
Gray creatures scurry around the corners: small and inescapable.
Articles of the archetypes. Archetypes of the subversive.
This subconscious is an underground empire,
laying-out battle plan after battle-plan,
by lamplight and with feverish eyes it traces arrows flying
across a mental landscape.
I stylize things in this light. I put in lines.
The subconscious grabs at the edges and lines them with shadow,
breaks them open because anarchy is a survival instinct.

It wins the skirmishes.

(I win the wars.)

II.

I creep forward slowly. Who owns which? Who is dreaming whom?
Am I really hearing Beethoven, or have I just composed
sonatas in my mind? Is that symphony mine?
Who knows what other revolutions I have instigated?
Off-the-cuff, I say, off-the-cuff and I slam open a door
and make an oratorical speech off-the-cuff
in the dusty courthouse of my psyche.
I will defend my right to be everything.
(This is how I mentally represent the world, with dirt and politics.)

I.

I am sure that the darkness is universal
And this dream sequence is like any other.
I am sure that rats haunt others in their plotlines, too.

(What do theories say about this? Should I be locked up in your clinic now?
Have you come to save the mad, by giving them a place to cage their madness?
Have you come not to be [ob]served, but to [ob]serve?)

II.

Beethoven, I, whoever – we have though this out.
We have set-up things for you to notice and judge and make inferences on.
We have traced your tracings, we have filled in your criteria with definition
just because we can. Just because you are the bystander in this scene
and you are never implicated.

Because we watch you out of your own eyes.

(We will still cage you, you who observe us.)

I.

Who is to end this? I own the dream and it keeps me.
I will fear for my safety, at one point,
but the self is my area of expertise.
If the tiny gray rats scurry around the corridors
And the wood in the doors is rotted to each single line in its grain,
if they are impossible to slam, if the darkness is too vague to light away,
if everything is symbol, if the orchestra is made of each
lonely thought howling in despair,
patiently, in separate spaces – who is to say that they have won?
Who is to say that this dream has divided?

The only rebellion is in silence.
The subconscious was meant to be subversive and to dissatisfy.
I, I am used to the dust and the secrecy of things.
I know where this corridor ends, what lies beyond each locked door.
I know the mechanism behind each metaphor.
I own this, I made it.

X.

Only the after-thoughts can kill. (But you, do you know who you are?)

inner wrist skin

if I could be anywhere, I would be in a corner
with the shape of the world defining me

even as I am allowed to settle,
mighty as dust,

into the hearts and secrecy
of things

Question for the Song

What is a song? What makes the music an insidious usurpation
against your will that suddenly you breathe only in tune,
with the tempo and rhythm and beat?
Why do songs exist – to steal us of our breaths?
Because there are too many notes
and they have to be structured into periodic silences
to let us behold them?
Where does the world go, when a song ends?
How do we turn off a radio?

Tonight Every Now

I like to stay awake when the whole world has gone asleep:
when someone shuts off the night lamp
and the blanket has been tugged
to a chin and the shrug of
contentment slings the dreamer over the cool smooth slide
of the pillow.
When the sleeper sinks into silence.
When the dust bins settle with a final rattle from afar,
as the tomcat
slinks away.

I like to stay awake and feel the city settle around me
unheeded. Unmindful of my affairs.
Astoundingly quiet
like a sunrise.
I like to stay awake and inhale the breath of a
million festive exhalations, watch the eyelids
of the dreaming flutter slightly out of control.
I like to stay awake and start counting the seconds
as they flicker by
inconsequential and
irreplaceable.

I like to stay awake and feel the weight of things
of blankets, of worlds,
of the day tomorrow
of my lids
slowly suspending each moment
in sightlessness —
until the night drops its jaw and yawns a yawn
so gaping even from afar and I
slip into the mouth of it, the utter
wordless blackness of it,
the sparseness of it,
until I
until I
slip.

And The Line Is A Moment

A drawing remains so completely untouchable
behind each of its lines: it is always someone else’s –
Another person, or yourself, a yourself different
from the exact self whose hand and heart and mind and cunning
went into that action of drawing a while ago, a day ago,
a different self ago.  Why is it so impossible to preserve the present? 
It is incomplete in the way that a mental landscape
cannot be caged within the definitions that vision understands;
but no matter; what matters is the trial and the error,
the shape and shade of things as the artist tries to catch up
to the image unraveling itself —
And still the present stays behind the sheen of the drawing
and it is impossible to replicate or to perfectly qualify. 
You can never define it too much, not even if you make it
a drawing beyond what can be seen.
Nothing is as impossible as undoing
the endless progression forward.

Here Are Projects.

Because I have learned that we should be crafts and smiths for the things we care about.