GRANDFATHER
You remember more of what is no more.
Past steps into your bedroom and your grandson
becomes your newly born. You love to address
him as Baba – this is how you called your first born.
The present blurred and faceless has no challenges
for you. Your face perks up and breaks into...
RENDEZVOUS
poems no longer emerge
out of some verdant soil
like lilies reflexively
spreading their pink cheer
they don’t happen as they did
twisting out of a gnawing gut...
glow worms on the screen
shedding light in dark corners
words tapping themselves out
of their own accord
have lost their easy fluidity
stanched like blood from a wound
they want me to...
In Pains
Like a mighty wind, it came
Infant memories of joy defamed
The punctured hearts on the slings
of torment catapulted to the strings
to sign the hymns of bitterness
Those heavy hearts in battered souls
Becoming numb to the pangs of death
Stealing the love of nature to their hub
Staring the ocean of forgetfulness never...
Civil Guardsmen
From a field of grasses dried
by wind, two civil guardsmen stare
toward the sun for traffic
on the lonely road
they have been stationed to protect.
They are tall
against the burnt horizon,
still as the ground itself,
and one is the reflection of the other
as, side by side, they stand
in place. Should one
turn around,...
TRIATHLON
Jane was in Vancouver one day and she stood
at the window and saw a woman crawling out
of the sea. The woman started running really
fast on the beach until she reached a bicycle
and then she hopped on it and kept going.
“Wow!” Jane said, “I just saw the evolution
of mankind in...
THE TRANSLATOR
You once contributed to a study. You said
what you took seemed superior to what you left behind.
You got the letter but never joined the team.
You put on a different costume, but you’re always a shaman.
You said you would storm the studio
and seize the local reality from the projectors.
You...
True Self
Nameless stands with his back to the wall.
Desperate grappling of an unsettled mind.
Piercing screams emitting from some lost place.
Unsure of any fate, real or imagined.
Looking past a vague blackness,
slowly filling an empty jar on the shelf.
Cardboard dreams crumbling,
while paint peels off in layers of obscurity.
A disease of doubt...
THE MAGIC OF STILLNESS AND THE CHAOTIC
Some people, lost souls,
caught in the absurdity of noise,
create magical stillness
out of the chaotic
outwitting comprehension.
Other lost souls,
caught in the absurdity of silence,
create the chaotic
out of magical stillness
sidestepping incomprehension.
I, confused by both noise and silence,
adoring absurdity yet not knowing
which is more magical
or comprehensible,
stillness or...