I feel invisible
Yet you claim(ed) I am the air you breathe
And perhaps like air I am always present,
But presently forgotten

The heaviness of your hush is crushing me with empty blows
This silence leads me to wander down a path cloaked in a heavy mist
That whispers harsh truths such as:
Our hopeless, fictitious, drawn out infatuation is like
A library book that was checked out last March
You underlined and doggie-paged the first few chapters
And then left it on your shelf to collect dust all of April and May

I foolishly kept begging you to finish the book
Read the last sentence
Take time to skim over the epilogue
Please
Find your way to the back cover

I foolishly ignored your “I can’t”s

And now it’s late August and our love is long overdue,
In the opposite sense of what the phrase typically means

I write with angry lead because
I am too stubborn to admit I just filled a trash bin with tissues
And that the cuffed sleeves of my flannel
Are damp like grass’s morning dew

I have so much more to say,
Although I cannot find the words
To say anything more than



You should’ve written.

Because two weeks of nothing
Was enough for me to realize that you are just a passing breeze
Seldom present, presently becoming something of the past.

I,
Am a teenaged girl
Lost between the deminsions of
Fantasy
And
Reality.
I am a Filipino and Mexican
Knowing no spanish
Lost in a language my mother has forgotten.

I am what it means to be a human being.
Trying my best to be there
Making zillions of mistakes that end up drowning me in the end.
Wanting to remember but always forgetting
Wanting to help but saying the wrong things at the wrong time.
Trying to find a place in the world
Only to end up being isolated like a lone wolf.

I am what it means to be a student,
Not loving the whole school system but trying her best to prove it wrong.
Educated by watching the world, day by day,
Philosophizing life
Analyzing the story lines that mean something
Surviving in a jungle we call High School
And day by day,
Struggling in classes just to pass it.
I am, what it means to be
not so smart, not stupid at all but
a hard worker, learning everything I can with the little time the school system provides.

So,
Who am I?
Well for starters,
To tell you who I am,
I'd have to spend the majoirty of my life writing a one hundred paged book,
With only one page that has one sentence of writing that says,
"Too much to say, ask me another day."

Who I am,
Is a teenaged-Filipina-Latina-video gaming-anime loving-poetry/story writing-girl
Who is always lost in her own world~

Baby, if you died tomorrow
I'd get our favorite line
from our favorite song
printed on my back, in your hand

The song you and I danced to
The one where the voice
doesn't match the man,

“It was in love I was created,
and in love is how I hope I die.”

It'd make me cry, everyday
because you did die
But I know you're so selfless
You'd only wish better for me

Now you, the one with the big hair and tiny body
The one who became my first high school friend.
For someone so blunt and honest
I'd never imagine you'd be so sweet.

So if you dies tomorrow
I'd put the twin strawberries
on the inside of my wrist
The ones you sketched on my birthday card

You wrote the two paged, double sided letter tucked inside
I still read it when I feel sad.
It reminds me how incredibly loved I am
and how just plain incredible you are.

You, with the short hair and round glasses
the one with a small voice and big, contagious laughter.
Your performances make my week
And you've made such a big bang in my life
In ways you can never see.

You are a firecracker
And though you may be blind to your own light
That is what I see in you.

You'd be a firework
Exploding on the back of my neck
It'd be more than every color in the rainbow
Because I can't associate just one with you

It's be messy and wouldn't go with any of my clothes
It's be hidden when my short hair grew shaggy
But it'd be undoubtedly you.

You, with the new golden hair
but the always golden insides
I think you, and I think perfect
I think smiles and sunshine and songs

I think all that is good.
So to think you ever want,
ever need, ever hurt
Seems impossible.

You hardly ever let that side show
but when you do
Well, even those moments are beautiful.

I don't know what I'd get for you
Maybe the first poem you wrote for me
The one with flowers draw in the background
- I'm still amazed, to this day, you knew I liked calla lilies

Maybe I'd get the last poem you wrote me
Both put a smile on my face
and I think both apply to you too.

You, when I think of you, I think cool moves at N-trip
I think always knowing what to say
I think beautiful straight hair, bright blue eyes
and completely making my day.

I think of beat box rapping
And your bubbly presence
For you, there is no word picture or phrase
That can sum you up better than your name

I've never seen it spelled that way
And it shows just how amazingly unique you are.

You; when I think of the tattoo I'd get for you
I think of the paper crane you gave me for my birthday,
Now, I know it was last minute
but I'm glad you didn't buy anything.

Paper, to me, is just a blank canvas
I can't wait to write on.
But when you fold it up the way you do,
It reminds me how complicated things are
- Things like you.

Like that crane,
I haven't gotten the opportunity to bend back those folds
Get to know those creases and cracks
But now I'm going to take the chance
That I may never see that bird in the same light again.

Now brother, I don't want to go into detail about your death
Life without our bicker and banter is one I don't want to imagine.

And if you died, I'd always regret not telling you
I love you in ways you cannot fathom.
I don't want to think of you dying,
let alone the tattoo I'd get for you...
Here it goes;

I've thought of things that remind me of you
Baseball bats you drop on your iPod
Hockey sticks who's height you've finally caught up to
But none of those things show you

I think of you and your crazy curly hair
Your goofy ghetto caps
Your thin toothpick frame
and your fast-paced gangster rap

But you can't sum those things up
In song lyrics and pictures.
So as selfish as this sounds,
I'd want you to get the tattoo

I'd want you to be the one with a book on your back
or a pen on your wrist,
I'd want you to be out there and living each day to the fullest
Live each day that I'd miss.

But if you did die tomorrow,
I'd have to drag myself to that parlor
Pick a photo or phrase
Made to represent you

And you have to understand, this isn't something I'd normally do
Tattoos are permanent; unforgettable.
The ink fades and they get ugly as you age
They probably hurt like hell to get and only worse to remove.

But if you died tomorrow.
any of you,
I'd get those tattoos.

Lymphoma
There was a  fundraising run for lymphoma and other cancers
A little notice for it on top of the garbage can
at a home grown Jamba Juice right off the BART in Berkeley

It hit home: what I was up against
People don't run through the streets casually
and my cat had lymphoma

I couldn't find him last night for the first time
He had his weekly appointment and I brought in
something that didn't look at all like he was the week before

They paged the vet and she came in
saying thing like he needed an IV and tests and
wasn't there nothing else to do
didn't she say that
he needs hospitalization--his liver
we can't tell you what to do
but it would all go in a circle and come back
to a suffering being who had
come to the end of what science could do for him
what she was trying to tell me in her barrage of words
came through loud and clear

They brought him in
with a blanket and a catheter
and he struggled until he got warm and then rested
I wanted him to see me, as the last thing he saw in this world

She took the three syringes out of her white coat
Don't hurt him, just don't hurt him
my only request
There was no pain
Only relaxation, sleep and then at last no heartbeat
Her ability, her smoothness of execution was perfect
and he went limp in my arms
not suffering

The nurse took his body away
"It's the last gift we can give them" she said
and I imagined a man, a stereotypical
image of a man pacing back and forth in a white coat in front
of a lecture hall full of vet students saying that
exact thing and there was a serious air in the classroom and some wrote this down,
it was so true, sound, capable and final
but this woman said it
this veterinarian from Michigan
and through my tears and grief
there was some kind of undercurrent
of relief, that there is no more pain for him
He no longer suffers
and I did all I could do

the third of january saw this;

the moon is a stone in the sky
and the night a blanket of holes,
the rain an error of clouds
and the stars a coda of cats;

this day told me;

you are hidden behind your face,
all your words are coded like scripts,
your body is full of lines,
you are paged inside yourself

Crowded by the ceiling’s emptiness (the room sticky with whispers)
names carved into grimy tiles, final shadows
            of the footsteps now hugged in dust,
                        and the ashes dulled the slapping of
                        feet on the ladder’s last rung.

            Huddled in the sour dimness of his shadow
                        is where our parents hid the prayers
                        that went undelivered –
[cloistered, naïve faith off Jacob’s Ladder]

He asked me questions that pricked too deeply –
            that fingernail clipped too short --
            as the invading hand of ******* parted words and stammers
            to play shadow puppets with, what Plato called,
            “three times removed” from the Truth.
And when leaving the choir’s balcony,
one can find the thumbtack of feeling in which
the glass-saints sweat all the industrialized emotions onto one’s brow.
            Does it seem like suffering? Catholic’s suffering.
Giving room for error in your lapse in charity.

In elementary school, we left our classrooms --
            two-by-two like businessmen arguing on the sidewalk --
Every Tuesday at 2:10pm to the hidden alcove that the administration
            gave
            to us.
Mrs. Condon, a strictly fat woman, strictly speaking,
dressed in red vests
and constricting black slacks, with a white binder,
salted as the laughter left in her footprints, reproving us that
as the Gifted and Talented, we must exercise
those gifts and talents.

I wrote a 256-paged novel that bought me one year
of slacking off behind a wooden desk because I was
11 years old
and that fact bought a bulbous beet of conditioning into the
curriculum. Ms. Condon made me edit my peers’ essays, give them grades
when all I wanted to do was play four square.

As I perched on my stool in class, properly equipped with unforgiving,
admonishing, Catholic red pens to point out other
11 year old’s punctuation and proper word usage. Like a tie to a neck, I
fiddled in vernacular, phrases, and semantics
as I unconsciously stacked layers of social prejudice, thicker
than the walls between silent parents, between some students
and I.
Stacked as quaintly as words upon words – hand over hand.

Mrs. Condon, Mrs. CEO, Ms. Too-Good-For-This, Bourgeois vs. Proletariats, I am the Marquis.

Like hounds held by leashes, the others locked to rebel, then whimpered to trail back, tails in hand.

Gifted and groomed to stack one spurned cinder block on social mobility.

In a whirr of dandelions, dice, and tax breaks, I knew how it felt to remain aloft, aloof --
            Mrs. Condon rewarded me with the cherry Twizzler of my spine
            and patted my head like the lapdog that I had been.

Poetry is my blank paged bible, my desolate scripture, my calligraphic beckon, my feather-inked-tip to empower the thoughts that run.

The pressure, this monster that builds inside me only fades to release.
I can't let this bad wolf grow, the beast needs to be sown, into the fibers of these pages, advice spoken from the wisest of the sages.

This literature, this free world, rids me from my worries and silences the flurry, that spins and rages inside of my heart and soul. Silences the whispering foes. I only wonder why I let it go.

Hello Poetry, I need you.

I lit a fire tonight
upon my grandfather's old typewriter.

I kindled it with all of his old pencils,
his favorite ballpoint pen,
his yellow-paged novels,
his newspaper cutouts of his past successes.

Hell, I even threw in the bookshelf.

And, just like that,
it was mortal history.
I did it for the **** of it.

I mean, if it was REALLY important,
it would be sprawled all over webpages.
Sprawled all over online searches and
digital databases.

Trust me, grandpa,
the future looks much better in High Definition.

You are the meaningful kind of poetry
That intimately speaks to me
Without a complaint or dilemma
Willingly writing each stanza

You are the best-selling story
I would love to be
Blissful lines joyful ending
Never tired of reading for living

You are the descriptive paragraph
Analyzing beauty in pain on my behalf
Something I deeply desire to feel
But unfortunately is not real

You are the ten-paged essay
I have been writing since May
Aspiring for motivation
Leaving no trace of emotion

You are the type of fiction
As close as I would find to perfection
Only found within my literature
Not my real life adventures

*-djs

i find myself exhaust'd
without words to fill
the gaps between breathes
standing in a garage
scavenging ashtray for
more cigarette than ****.
feelings of a cut and run
history. always cyclical, always
flooding. again, repeating.
i may not be able to
tell the future, but
i will laugh should we make it
together. my memories
have been lost before, never
quite wiped clean.
i once could live.
these days writ of longings,
of fated desperations, writ
of corner'd separations
while eyes haze and lids droop.
while connections are made
between the breaks in
statements you had to say.
lemme be straight, i am done.
taken to apathy. absconding
with nil thought of leaving
negative remembrances behind.
leaving yellow-paged notebooks
of a past life.
days of the deifiers, days of their
fat-trimming inquisition. For
the flesh lusteth against Spirit,
and the Spirit against the flesh.
and those were scrawnier days.

I'm not Zonke, but tonight we gonna talk about
Feelings.
We gonna talk about stealing.
My Heart.
Do you remember when i was repealing,
You went all kneeling,
Appealing,
Begging,
Caring.
You molested my Feelings.
All this pretending
Fake loving
French kissing
Love making
while screaming
and hard breathing
Midnight
Phone ringing
I've been ignoring
but its starting to be annoying
While you were taking a shower
Quickly I paged, while paging I perceived
The ******* is cheating,
I am leaving
With my Feelings
I am taking
All my love and belongings
Now that my face you're no longer seeing,
Your pinna, my voice no longer hearing,
Your mouth, my lips no longer tasting,
My nose your nose, our noses no longer
rubbing..
You wanna talk about Feelings...
What Feelings?

We keep on cutting, edges off the blind parts of our hands.
Everyone you don't trust is getting, a little too close, and
Soon you'll be so loud that all of your fears come out.
Each ounce of you, that I packed into sandwich bags
And shoved down my throat, that now while you try
To back out, your bloodied olive-sized organs
Get jammed in my lungs and my ribs. You pretend
That your heart is a bouncy beach ball filled with helium,
But with even the practice you had at lying, I can smell
How new at this you are. Some part of me, childish still
I presume, brushes my fingers through your hair and
Over your ears, then touches this face stuck with splinters
That you've tried to use scissors to combat every thing
Making you feel differently about us now. Now.

Using the contraption from when we started out,
The Jaguar convertible with the top brought down,
Cruising up to San Fran when we thought the sun was out,
But we managed to make it the only Summer where it snowed downtown.
Even with the hummer, you were on my right, looking backwards out
Of your eyes. Glass crystals cut the corners of your mouth, looking back,
I centered my turn-ons by the bruises I bit into your calves.

The number of times I've let you rattle my cage,
******* up my brain. The slave wage you paid,
Main-stage, 'The Rage', for a hand-me-down
Chance to get laid.

****** and God, a forty-hour a week job,
Benchmark No. 1, 'The Saw.'

Tailored into the skins, needle pins and numbness
Attached to the dumbest excuses to run with.
For the ***, the anticipation was sinning enough,
That every once in a while I could afford to be turned off.

The next three days and Maisie,
Your teenage head went crazy,
Every ten minutes you paged me.
The price of admission, I wished,
Would've been the attention I'd give,
A cannibal habit, you kicked. I quit
Bothering you about what your *** size is.

After eight months, of which I said they were probably closer to nine,
Was the beginning of when I could convince you to drive yourself
Into my house. While the closet I could afford ensnared you,
I wore washed up Air Jordan's with skinny black Levi's,
You dyed your hair to gray before going blonde, it went to your hips
But you kept a ponytail or bob.

I'm remembering now, nearly every other day at age twenty-two,
Going to Clark's and ordering hashbrowns with green peppers on Sherman Avenue.
Every resistant bone in my body bothers me, I sit with the transistor between
My first finger and index, tuning the ****, while rehearsing violent seminars
Between you and I that resembled closely The Bay of Pigs. Your fingernails never
Had time to grow long enough to paint. You also never wanted to wear high heels.

This is the first chance without plastic lunch-bags in my throat, that I can chew up my food, without choking on olive pits that have been Getting stuck in my esophagus for the last thirteen years.

Don't hate me.
I know you saw me, you're sawing at me.
But when I see you, I say, "Marry me."
We only have seconds left,
Give me your shallow breaths,
I'll cup my hands and catch the water while you drink from me.
Drink from me, every flavor that you can grip between your teeth.
There are only seconds now, I'm counting 23.
Why won't you love me? Why won't you love me? Why won't you love me?
I choke. I ache. I scream.
Kristine.

3 seconds left.

My summations are wholly gnomic.
Some call these articulations "weakness,"
Others, being driven, lettered, undress
Them imperceptibly. I'm Homeric
Without grandeur of high-flown rhetoric.
Epics I pen dissolve the world's heart
And suffer abandonment in K-Mart,
Pulp-paged and forgettable. Ironic?

Yes, but such sentiment is commonplace.

am I even supposed to be in love you? your thick horn-rimmed frames and curly hair never cease to leave my brain and remains engrained in my thoughts from when I first wake up, to bus rides on my way to school, coffee in the foggy afternoons, and when I lie awake at night staring at the artificial stars spread out on my ceiling. I miss you so much and I am not sure why we had never spoken before you moved but maybe it was fate that led me to finding you through the internet and let us become lovers in such a modern age. it’s easier now with our computers and iPhones yet I know that we both still crave romantic letters in swirly handwriting or ten paged typewritten letters from across the country in the back seat of a bright mustard, gypsy caravan with a peace sign engraved onto the license plate. I wish you could just easily come back instead of having to wait for opportunities to visit during school breaks, since we are constantly in town when the other is not. do you still write passages about your childhood memories and about “love” because they were equally as beautiful if not equally true. what are you thinking about when you are passing through the golden gate bridge as the window is halfway open and a vampire weekend song echoes through the car, mixing in with the sounds of the sea? do you still hold your breath in the old rainbow tunnel we used to make wishes in? or do you not even bother to try. I hope we can make things work since this love is anything but unrequited, and I am craving your freckles more than anything in the world. no, maybe even more than anything in the universe. I am going nowhere soon so come back whenever you would like before time runs out and we head our separate ways. please, for your name is starting to appear in my notebook too many times and I am madly in love with the idea of being with you, even if for only one day.

On my way to post a letter
Out my car Windows
I saw a grammar
Make a dash across the road
In an effort to be punctual
To a function at the TAB.
I skidded my car to a full stop,
Lost control in her direction,
Not in time to avoid my space-bar
I dashed over to find
She was in a comma!

Hit with a forward slash
It was a capital offense
I could not escape
Yet I was bold,
Tensely outlined the events
They docked a dot point
off my pen licence
and after bringing me before the keyboard
Sentenced me to a short spell
In a prison pen
(as it was just a lower case).

Entering the ward,
I paged the shift nurse
After her line break
‘- Would she wake?’
As it turns out her back space
Will have question marks
But her chances are greater-than most
Her progress is fontastic
For her age bracket
But her colon was disturbed -

She may have trouble
                                       with
                                                    her
                                                               vowels.

would be walking in the snow, alone

and the soft padded movements under your feet

will ask me questions others wouldn't dare to know.



you

would sit next to me on the bus

and ask how i read without getting sick

and i would throw words up on you.



you

would be in a bookshop

in the metaphysical section

and you would show me thick paged dream interpreters

and i would show you the cover of ****** Astrology.



you

would be lost in a song

throwing glances at me from stage

and the passion that spews out from being on top of everything

everyone's listening.



you

would compliment my brain

and not my body.



i would try to impress you with both.



you

would be smoking a bowl under blacklights

and i would ask for a hit

of you, of you.



[who are you? where are you? how do i find you?]

Battling.

   The poem,
     half-written, inches
along numerous tries,
   cramped in places, pinched
   somewhat in style,
its subjective meaning
reluctantly waits
    in the sidelines.
   Silence
  has not appeared yet
    so I put aside pen
to try later again.
Tenderness, sadness or rage
   cannot be paged
    in too much noise
but former things sundered
   begin to knit
    as subject-choice fits
into a slot before long.
  Boisterous word-swing
rattles a lot in my mind,
    sentencing rings
  bells which battle with lines
as ends slowly begin to rhyme.
   Writing is vital
   in keeping me sane
   betwixt times
   that mix sense with the inane.

there are no dreams here
they are but fragments of thought
dismissed and abandoned to the wilderness
of our imaginations
to intersect or collide
perhaps hundreds or thousands at a time
to create some kind of patchwork mosaic of
tossed millisecond ideas and flashes of imagery
that have nowhere to go
these are not dreams
a vast wasteland of connected disconnected energy
of the mind

last night we walked together
and discovered our shared love of art
and ghosts
while the world slept
while I slept
I later met you in a book store
where we paged through Vangogh prints
and discussed the peculiarities of  'The Smoking Skull'
I awoke to a beautiful Sun and for a few joyous seconds…thought to
call you

there are no dreams here

We could be a famous romance, you know.
Writing the story together, it would be whatever comes after brilliant.
My metaphor, my metaphor please let down your guard
Write to me in your personal tongue
Scream at me on parchment
Let's be the vintage cliché we've always admired.

God, I love it when you talk poetry to me.

We wouldn't just burn bridges. We'd set the whole godammed world on fire with our writer's love shining in their eyes,
blinding them with the metaphorical questionings of two adolescent souls resonating in their skulls.
But God knows this world has aged us far beyond our literal years.

Write to me, love.

Poem for poem, line for stanza 'cause we both know you can convey a message on a fortune cookie and have it smack harder than I could with a 700 paged memoir of the broken.

Let's carve history with quills writing in our blood.
Our unlived story thrashing in its nonexistence dying to become reality

Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 366 paged book.
write a good one!*
Don't bring the past to the future.
let the past be the past and
let the future have new adventures

...thought i was on the moon's surface,
tumbling high, low, over its dark craters
but, no...i was floating on the earth's atmosphere,
where winds of all seasons blow without cease
where fogs and mists do exist
where clouds do form and mold
they are, in truth, in their own world...
  
but, it suddenly rains
can't help it... i slowly descend...

...i am transformed  into an umbrella.  
for, Gene Kelly  soon takes me, while singing a cappella
"I'm singing in the rain," to my ear he whispers
... and a bit later, the song,  he would whistle
in his free hand, i become a blooming, pale- rose-y stunner
claiming eyes of passersby, through my magical flower power...

but...all wonderful dreams come to an end
when the aroma of steaming brew permeates the air
right through my nostrils....and i suddenly choose:
cream and sugar.........for my coffee
while reading classic works...or writing sad or crazy poetry
radio plays, "My Funny Valentine"....and i feel
like a singer, who sometimes sings off key
singing of thoughts of who i wanna be
singing of dreams of who i wanna be with
singing, i wish i could dip my feet into different seas
singing, i wish...i wish, i could travel with thee
but now, i'd rather be, there.....in my cozy nook
to slowly scan through the pages of a thick book

my life...a hardbound, glossy-paged book, rimmed with brown and gold
where half of my pages still choose to be unturned, unread, and untold
while half...the rest of me, dog-eared or otherwise, have started to unfold.
  

Sally


Copyright September 2015
Rosalia Rosario A. Bayan

New poems are great to write
But even previous writes still have lessons and meanings
That even the author didn’t quite uncover.

Downloadable music is efficient and convenient
When certain physical technology cannot be found
Or obtained.
Yet an LP gets a previous generation to see
That music from any time and for all occasions
Is just as much accepted
Than the “latest” or “most trending” iTunes release.

eBooks can act like a portable library
For those who love a good book, newspaper, etc.
But seeing many paged, hardbound or paperback books
Helps readers to remember the quantity of a collection
And the discipline of organization
Rather than having a tablet always ready for on-the-go
When sometimes the only place to go
Is a living-room couch or dining-room table.

Video games are quick-advancing
And the various virtual realms are eye-capturing
And free-from-reality.
But sometimes there are times
Unfocused from technology
That are just as much an escape from reality
Such as a walk in the park,
Biking along a mildly-breezy, clear-skied beach boardwalk,
Claiming front-row seats to a basketball game,
Or playing croquet, if that’s your forte.

Ingrid Bergman
Or Rod Carew
Even the old
Can rise anew!