Marmalade skies making love to a ball of fiery mass

led to part swiftly from his maiden’s *****

fertile with the fawn of the trees.

Buoyant as the winds waltzing along the sea

the sparrows poured forth the blue stretch

familiar in their parade, uncertain in their path.

Clinging to infant evergreens

the morning’s dews slid past the satin beds

and into the dreaming earth,
shut and hidden as pearls.

The fortnight’s show of drizzle

hung limply in the nipping air, here to stay for

a bracing encore, wild violets gathering

tribute upon its gray curtains.

Soldier bees on their march

far, far away from the six-eyed castle

buzzing until the forest falls into song
of the sleepful, the land of talking boars
and maidens with golden braids for days

I stand in the midst of all

dazed as an infant

eyes flutter like fans
in the heat of visions

seen but shrouded

solitary but shared.

Beholding in my finite eyes

the horizons echoed my sunken soliloquies

like an imagined memory coming to life.


I was quite absolute then

that I, before what could be

the tricks of the mind

or the dreams of the heart,

am just a split second in an
everlasting expanse

of space and time.

“I love the rain and how it tells me that even the great skies cry over something, too.”

It's a sick, sick town
Where men have come to rot
As a worm infested fruit
Lying wet and rummaged on the ground

The neighbors with their bent noses
And upturned mouths
Bubbling with the agenda, the filth
Of their smiling counterparts next door
In town fiestas they squalor like
Emperors on roasted pigs, rice cakes
and goat bellies raised and slaughtered
They dine like fine crickets loud
And unconcerned about matters
Which the small town does not speak

Scoundrels of politicians
Fetchig money like leaves from their
Cotton pockets
Oh the election is under way!
Come come there is money this way!
Forget honesty it can only buy
You a rumbling stomach and a hut
Crumbling from debts and frets!

Who cares though
When seventy strides from you
Gunshots sparkle in the midnight skies
All eyes fainted all breaths shallow
And someone's just got wallowed
In a heat of greed and contempt
Poor son!Poor son!
Used to know the wretch
No family?No peso to his name?
Let's move on to our siestas
Justice won't spare us from hell

God has saved a seat for us instead
The church has made its job clear
Seven Sundays and we are but saved!
But the crowd upon
The altar thins like the old priest's head
Gleaming like chalice
In the dimming lights of the Lord
The people look on and yawn
For the gospel has now become
As good as miracle, literally.

The poor remain poor
The sinful prosper
And this sick, sick town
Has its marrows ******
Dry as a liar's throat
And you tell me to love it
Like a sweetheart of brazen days?
Like the grazing stars in the
Blank fields of bluish horizons
I painted with amulets and rockets
with my visions as a child?
And you tell me I was born of a town
About to sweep into nothing along
with the collapse of its people?

Mother those dead people in the books
Who pen tragedy, brew empathy in a whisk of their words
Seem to understand me better than you do
And to think they say mothers
Have intuition
As razor sharp as your mouth
For someone with so much ability
You fail at seeing nearby distances

No I will not become a mother
Like yourself
I refuse to believe a world
That doubts me as I am
I am a woman
And they see me as less than a man
How absurd my fictional mother
Maya Angelou made me think
I was more

Read Sylvia Plath if you could just
Maybe you'll hear the voice of my soul
Which you have rightly marked
By your own answers
No I will keep wearing
Worn out sneakers and dip them
In mud once in a while
Also, I do not want anyone
To tell me my femininity
Is anchored on fair complexion,
Rose red lips that open
Only to say yes
Because it is not mother dear

You see I have learned a lot from pain
To understand that what is good is
people as they are and were
I have learned enough from a curse
That lives within me
(And which you dont seem
to comprehend)
That I believe in myself
No matter how much
Broken bones lie beneath me
I've died so many times mother
But I lived again and again
To be mad, to be absolutely
irrevocably insane
Headfirst, a marked man
But nevertheless alive
Before those who tell me
I am a nonexistence.

The clouds scatter askew
Into the dimness of mere moments to twilight
Water jumped on my skin
Playing run and hide
Sifting pieces of a small town
Into a phantom's mosaic
I was a spectator to the familiar
While mother has sent me
To an errand of a quarter pound of ginger
Those deformed baby toe-like things
Hideous almost supernatural

A middle aged cabby stops
With a knowing look
On to my face that only moves
To answer, not to question
I sat down on the old leather chair
A waft of fish and dried sweat
Dust and a little exhaustion
Regaining his gear, every bit
A weary man and so
The drive went silently
As a secret.
The exhausted cement path
Looked frozen, deserted
As a widow's heart.

There were faces of mixed hues like
Technicolor film in a psychedelic haze
Lined like domino pieces
In the streets of this sick town
Some leaving, some going
To some smaller street perhaps
Off to estrange their lives
From grey shanties, small lumps of
Grains on their shaky family tables.
Like the downpour they are sad
Sadder than the cabby's squeaking wheels
Between the tension of the road
And the misfortune of its master
I say hello like an egg laid by chance
In a nest made for spiders
I do not belong here
But the web ties me head first.

So on a night
As dry as a seed
The fourth child
Leaned in towards the darkness
Barely a summer's past of his sixth year
He bubbles with the hope
Of children so unaware
They mirror a blank sun

As the abyss catches on
With his flaming wonder
He saw a gleaming mirror
Of himself upon the dull walls
Waving like a tide
On the high cliffs
He goes and goes
Unstoppable as a waterfall

The shadow looks back
Black as his eyes
Fluid as the tips of his hair
It resembled a cloak
Inscrutable like fear
Familiar like beauty
Mirroring the infinite glide
He strokes with the brushes of youth

An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
Inflections of the same stock
Light the destroyer and creator of kin
But the child
Smiles to himself, undaunted
His counterpart toothless
Breathless as a rock
Could not.

There is an absence of light
screaming around me
It is the first of February
the night crawling, an obituary
Conspicuous and hung with death.

A blackout
the local electric company
has yet to be friendly
I didn't mind
The air was young and a tease
Through the windows it approached
Like a growing fire
Closing in on my bare ribs
Soothing my sore mind

Out on the receiving territory
Comes the warm excess
Like oranges hilted on wax
It was sad claiming
They wage brighter wars
Than my soul
But I inhaled their spirit
For a quietness lived in their glow

Barks scrape against the summer dread
Unable to shut their stubborness
They connive with the crickets
For a night of overture
I can smell ambivalence
In the starless skies
Will it cry?
Or will it die along as with everything?

I'd embrace the cold with
My equally hostile arms
It treats me with dignity
From outside the cars screech
Like a wailing woman
Stalling the witch's eye
With fragments of yellow and white
Onto the oblivion of the roads
And the loneliness of a night just
Coming to life.