When at first it happens I want none of it. I even say no. I discard the plane tickets, the train stamps, the envelopes of money into a safety deposit box some train station off The Embarcadero and just head East. It frightens me, I'm horrified. The potency is developing in my inner organs, I can't cough right, sleep right, I just suffer and complain. Instead of doing things differently, they've made it so you can soak right in. Just strand yourself on the side of the roadway and they've got rules for you too. The sounds are torturous, the rooms are empty, and the men grow complacent and empty. Nothing is as serious as this. Four years ago a car, three years ago a plane, now I just shuffle and complain. I search for a key to my happiness. I look for it in desktop monitors, caramel apple lollipops, new cashmere vanilla candles, consuming six or more bottles of water a day, E-Cigarettes even, even those, I use apple juice, lychee nectar, mango sorbet, and chocolate fudge sundaes. I'm 40 up on the 140 I went down with. All the miles I'd walked in a firm step, a fever, a bag full of cheap wine for a man that works the car park. 43rd between 8th and 9th. Every thing is bright lights and theater nights. More pacing, there is gum stuck to every square of sidewalk, men and women wheel around a block away selling discount drugs in the streets and outside the Subway on 44th, in the Chinese food mart on 7th. They blow blow blow in their little plastic straw tubes and for $12 a drop they ask you to reach your hands inside their pockets, "take what you like and leave the rest. No one remembers it like this, the girls laugh practically upside down, they wear sky-blue light dyed denim overalls, covering all the parts of their shoulders but exposing their ****, they have plastic bags in their boots, and cute bobby bobbing hair cuts like water crest shoots exploding in lime juice. They pace too, but their legs are shorter, their conversations longer, the horns in their heads grow slowly out from midnight. The devil put the hate on them too.

Even the children are bigoted in this bicentennial. The ******'s nook is no longer the sewing shop in the corner of the strip mall up by Deerbrook Mall. I haven't seen a fountain with change in it since the 80's. The newest thing I heard about imaginations are that, "They come out the first and last Wednesday of the month, you gotta check with Game Stop if you want to pre-order the right ones." I think we must be on number 18 by now. There were four of us riding shotgun in the boxcar up to the valley last month, now they don't even run the trains anymore. One third of everything left to go.

I'm growing quiet; if they can't tell it's not my job to teach them. If they can't spell, I ain't gotta word to word combat that's going to come down on 'em. My brain is so uptight I can't sleep before sundown or sunrise. I see legs and oil futures with every blink. I listen to the old phone messages constantly. I make up stories to go with the missed calls. Still I hope everything will work out okay, because nothing is as serious as this. It makes me sick. It makes the guy undo itself with a brass nail, the blood unclogged from the rash from last month, I find out I'm toxic to poisons, and then I'm told that they're a prescription for that too. It wasn't a ******* rumor. The time to back up or move is now. A idle figure in an orange shirt, a tapestry that moves with every hallucination, forty, fifty, sixty hours I've never slept. I may have been years. My stomach is rusting from water with nowhere to go. I feel sick. I feel woozy, but I don't believe in feelings. I sit upright because I'm uptight, I turn my head around and look over my shoulder. But I know that any friend that's worth looking at me wouldn't arouse my spirit at this hour. There is a net that they speak of when everything's gone. It's the madness that transforms nothingness when the devil's around. Whole empires are crashing. Whole bottom drawers of unworn clothing, tagged and abetted stuffed into black crape garbage bags and drove off into the moonlight. I'm sweating and soporific, living half by half two in and two out, if I had the chance I'd try to remember just which way I get out. When I check on the rumors, when I say my goodbye, I know that I'm the only one sitting in this room of cocksure spirit animals and half-plastic book casings, and that no one whispers and no one cries, not even the bereft can produce a lullaby. I am dying to figure out how to move voicemails from iPhones to iTunes, I googled it while sitting down in the city last night. Poor service. 10 months. Not even one blame the famous few.

After tired comes guilty, after guilty the shame, after that apathy, after that I'm awake. I've never been good at being better than me. But those voicemails, I want them somewhere permanently.

There are no bells, but they are there
lining the streets, palms outstretched

women on their knees between cream-colored petals
of orchids carelessly blooming by the drainage ditch

their scrubbed feet free of rice paddy mud
with palm fronds overhead

in their hands, cut butter and fruit
for the monks that file past in smart orange robes

if you were here, you would watch them with me
you would peel lychee fruits for breakfast

at this hour the people are wide awake
and the day is struggling to keep up

somewhere behind the early clouds
the sun is winking over the trees

morning birds never seem to sing here
where the rain has been falling for days

famished lychee
bent on treason

almost unknowingly furious/
dragging feet
all the way

to gather the fairest feathers,
now lumped under dreary
epitaphs.

Lychee blackberry of sweetest variety*
Shouts the vendor
They look juicily nice
But when I ask the price
Find it too high.

Why them forgone
Summer’s yields live short
I lay my hand on one
They are money’s worth.

And I think of my place
In next year’s summer days
What if I vacate this space

Nothing forever stays.

In every art and artifacts,
I'll still find that is pleasing to my eyes,
Like seeing lychee that makes want to crave,
Craving for resentment in someone's eyes,
Turns out I was seeing myself in solitude,

This time, it was no ordinary day,
I think of every word I have to say,
But I had none to lay,
Instead of laying in those eyes,
Thinking myself what I bargained,
To be the highest bidder.

Meaning to say, I wasn't looking at any art,
I saw something that pleased my eyes,
In a quiet place that made it felt like home,
Glass panes are all I can see but a single sight to see.

A sight that I won't lose till its wings spread
A statue that I'm willing to mold by a thread
Humanity restored in my eyes.
By a single whip of your coiffed hair

Like the morning brew that struck me
By the color of your hair, that is full of bliss
Nevertheless, I'll still get lost in those eyes
Making every gaze in my mind
A dream that i made, to get lost by the so-called life
Moments that i'll spend, for me to keep it from being tainted
Savoring every beauty till i faint.

Every time I have a symposium
Following a banquet
With my muse
I start with three libations
With the best lychee wine I can get
From Mauritius !
The first is to her eyes
The second is to her lips
The third to Venus.
Then I spread the floor smeared with wine
With vanilla perfumes and jasmine flowers
While the moon is playing a tune on her flute of Pan
Then it's  time to sing a hymn
And only after all this ceremony and ritual
When the symposiarch says : "drink !"
And the symposiasts  start to drink
and be drunk
the symposium is declared open,
Only then,
we can start our tête-à-tête.

nothing new here
     lollygagging
sunshine feebly
sneaks across   feet
     tangled   duvet
xylophone of toes
bubbles   in     lemonade
   form a circle
drink fizzles
     like the death of a firework
four   high   heels
     foxtrot upon floorboards
rainbow notes to one another
spread   out   as   dolly   mixtures
   on a table
strewn in coffee mug stains
resemble sets of braces
     crumbs on a sofa
white socks   on the radiator
shrivel and   dry
     shave but leave
barbed-wire     stubble
in the sink by accident
     fingerprints
a translucent vine
on the shower door
mine     or yours
   skin turns lychee-pink
rare   fossils
earrings sparkle under a lamp
making   pancakes
     your specialty
let my fingers     blizzard
over every part
   I haven’t found yet
chuck the   ugly   bits of me
out the window
get whipped   up
in your hurricane
     speak your name

Scabby fixes on brick trinities
Nouveau riche social climbers
empty holes
rubbled interims' morning glories
rats jovial
Someone's been killing the cats

Three half squares broken open
Shorn wallpaper on each
Large machinery
downing old world's new world
Kickball is
only legend to internet urchins

Sitting on stoops
punching thumbs on cellular
apparatus for the ages
Doohickey haves
Doohickey have-nots

If there must be urban renewal
leave me cherry Italian water ice
at a buck a pop
I don't much care for
Cold Stone Creameries'
Green Tea and Lychee Martinis

The red brick roofs,
telephone wires,
and soft, evenings like this
are what I will remember
in the coming years.
Sipping lychee drinks
and watching the pale pink
of the horizon’s glow.
And it’s so still,
so quiet
except for the steady air
the breeze of distant cars
and children’s voices
from the old park.

This is the night town,
a town of peace.
though, really, it’s a village.
My village.
Unnoticed on common maps.
I used to see it as so,
so small
because I know every path,
every hidden street,
and all the fields that surround them.
But now I’ve realised
that it’s holy ground.
Ironic for an agnostic,
but I love the songs
the blackbirds sing
outside my window
in the mornings,
and at night,
and now,
the time when everything is soft.
Since we’ve passed the spring equinox
I’ll find comfort in
domestic love,
in a place it takes
fifteen minutes to walk round.
Please be quiet.
I just want to sit, and listen.

he called from the edge
of a cliff
             “look to the stars”

a peach pit
or plum stem
in orbit

adrift

he thinks
about
being forgotten

in the garden
overgrown
no chemical
in the memory

and the room
is more open now
halved
with nectar
dripping

the cosmos
exposed
and he
enters
through the
stone
of a
lychee

From the ***** of God, multitudes of visions cascade
In to the peripheries of consciousness
Epiphanies herded in to magnificent parade
Fulsome in all their lusciousness
Which God it is is not always clear
But the form of her Beauty is sharp and sure
The enchantment grows as she dances ever near
Consists in her blessing perfect care, cure
Bursting out of the hinterlands of repressed psyche
She, spirited, splendid, dances
Sweeter than peaches or lychee
In enamouring trances
     O form of forms, your beauty sharp
     I honour you on lofty harp

can grow forty feet
improves blood circulation
sweet tasting lychee

Woman, name unknown,
     I think of your marigold hair, marigold hair
and bare feet in the grass.

There was a voice: do I ask?
   Do I disrupt a pleasant scene
or would I ***** like a thorn?

The dream, to speak your name,
   become accustomed to its taste,
like drinking the sun through a straw.

Alas, if only I’d thought before,
   my mind wandering, thoughts bouncing
conker-like, hard and loud.

I wished to cradle your smile,
   a great beam, lychee pink,
dismiss the crowds.

The chance, sinking, my body
   stifled by unseen vines,
your name a hush of water in my hands

but your hair, bare feet,
   like a summer breeze
in the freezing core of winter.

(because location is not a cure and I am still the problem)

The motorbikes don’t care if I’m sad.
The coffee is thick like secrets
and still I manage to spill it down my shirt
like a metaphor.
Like I’m trying to prove I’ve learned nothing.

I watch two women bargain in a language
I still haven’t learned—
I tell myself I’m soaking it in
but really, I’m just sweating through my bike-shorts under polyester dress
and writing poems in my head
about men who don’t know where I am.

I eat noodles at 9 AM
and think about what it means to be soft
in a place where everything is louder than me.
I walk past altars and incense
and pretend it’s for me.
That someone here might pray me into clarity.

I keep writing like I’m in a movie
about a girl who flees the country
to find peace
and ends up writing the same poem
with different weather.

I take pictures of lanterns and puddles
and temple steps
but the notes app still opens
to that one draft
with too many ellipses
and not enough closure.

I know I’m lucky to be here.
I know I’m lucky to be anywhere.
But even halfway across the world
with lychee tea on my chin
and house shoes that don’t fit—
I’m still writing like I’m in Connecticut
still craving something impossible
still carrying my ghosts
like they made it through customs.

I came all this way
and I’m still me.

That has to mean something.

What you should know
is that I’ve never done parties,
except that wasn’t quite a party,
more an excuse to liquor up
in the first week back,
tepid attempts to recall the faces
who swam past a year before
like scarecrows from a car, expressionless
in a chaos of fields.

Told this was integration
but anywhere else would’ve done,
mumbles like distant storms
behind closed doors,
footsteps a high echoed chime up the stairs.

The room, a tumble-dryer of conversation.
A brown drink, probably ***, or coke, or vinegar,
somehow navigated to my hand.
A pilfered traffic cone in the corner,
playing cards slapdash on the coffee table,
forgotten hearts, fading diamonds.

Somebody spoke, a game began.
Spilling secrets, unwillingly or too drunk
to care otherwise,
each hopscotch-like laughter another
thorn of headache.
I zoned out as if watching the shopping channels,
palms peppered with the braille
of my nails mining into my hands.

The spreadsheet of names scrolled down,
guys with over-gelled hair, ******* shirts
then me, trickling out my half-hearted truth,
quickly dismissed, knocked to the curb,
my social status cemented once again.
Then you, the last to speak
in this merry-go-round
clouted me awake as though coma free.

o Lychee-pink fingernails, slushie-blue eyes.
o Seashell necklace, skin several sunbathes down.
o Hush of a French accent, denim jeans punctured with holes.

The images, the speech came quick
as if behind the glass of a bullet train.
I tried to capture them like a cat
hopping up for dragonflies,
but these were more like snowflakes
perishing on my tongue.

If my mind hadn’t been frazzled
with the intricacies of anxiety
I would have uttered my name,
snaffled yours, an early birthday gift,
but no.

The evening capsized, us students dispersed
like birds barked at by a dog,
the clock’s downcast dialogue
of time gone, opportunities missed.

I stayed awake with the shape of your face
as though viewed through cellophane.
You mattered somehow, electrocution
right into my brain, your secret swallowed
by the ghosts of the night.
Hell, I thought, resting with my vivid
fabrications until the next day, the next year.

I look up into the lilac sky
And you glide across like a floater in my eye

You are not to me the death dealing cross
Making other mammals freeze and suffer loss

I see you as a rare free soul
Defying the death dealing action that is Man’s role.

                              —————————

You dark flying scimitars with your piercing cry
Wheeling from your element, the stormy sky

With your shrill threats you dare to defy the stick swung with
all my might

Brushing my head and then returning like killer boomerangs
in flight.



                              —————————

With discriminating care you pluck those little fish you seek
With your long, curving, darting beak

If you are disturbed you rise without a cry
And flap away soundlessly into the protecting sky.


                              —————————

You are comic like this rhyme
Which I only pen because I have the time

You flew in with a squawking cackle
That sounded like a football rattle

You have only one objective, to eat your fill
By ravaging that tree with your outrageous bill

Its like a mango eating other fruit
Lychee, som-o, champoo, kanun, all will suit

You return a piercing stare with you target eye
And to the starer it magnifies.