HOME

Home is the non-place
Energetic spiraling
Of warmth. Cocooning
With future imaginaries filling lazy hours
Conveniently forgetting to get up off the couch.

Walls disintegrate from my slow breath’s
Steady stream—inhaling the apartment’s musty objects,
Exhaling dreamlike sequences of memories.

Their vibrations crumble the ceiling
In a dissonant reach. Freshening white noise
Creates time, space—chronotopic virtual richness
Of abstractions. Being is prospective.

A humming enmeshed with mine churns
Fresh olive bread. An hour later, after left
To rise, bake, its salty, chestnut-sweet scent
Enters. Brings me back to baking with Mom
Or allowing her to soothe me as anxious midnight hours
Of preparation for what’s next
Threaten anxiety – fear – a freeze.

I hold my stomach, rubbing the spot
I hope will someday grow, like hers for me.

Silence, as the historicity in my daydream
Collapses gracefully. A neighbor’s high-heeled clickety clack above
The yippy next door dog’s rough greeting—Pah-lunk!
Male shoes cross the threshold
Eyes still closed, I feel his socks’ electricity on the wooden floorboards
Shifting closer—and he pounces gingerly
Like a young lion, flirting another cub in the wild.

He wraps the blanket around us both, his soft chilly paw
Finds the shadow left by my hands.

Owl’s Head, Maine

In the flight path at water’s edge
The fog killed a woman
Her plane hit that rock over there
Six weeks ago
But she was alone – maybe
It was suicide.

She could have reached
Enlightenment in that cockpit
The fog would have known
If Heaven exists, fog
Is clearly a form of its power
Bridging ocean, plane, bridge
With the sky – now invisible
Like an opening to a time warp
The tiny water particles
Carrying, bouncing light of
Forgotten souls.

My ears hear boats and planes
Birds, an occasional human call
But all I see are the rocks and
Waves at my feet
Sometimes seaweed and a floating bird –
Fog covers what I think is there.

Should I trust my solipsismal ears?
Could these ebbing vibrations
Really be echoes of the past?
I reach forward to a burnt log
Of driftwood, carried through the
Maine inlets to heat s’mores
Or just warm wrinkled toes and fingers.

The wood was dead as the tree
Fell – unheard, unseen
And died again – drowned at sea
A third time as a match
Was held to one end and it caught
Now I break off three parts
For my next charcoal drawings,
Hurling the remainder
I hear a splash that sounds
Like it should as it hits water, but
Invisibly made
By the thick, radiant fog.

Disruption

Seven o’clock sidewalk
Sheung Wan shuffles
Along in riptide waves.

Predicting their paces,
I weave to the beat –
Jay-Z blasting “New York”—

Keeping my glaring lime phoned head
Up, constantly seeking the route after
Long commute; my flat beckons.

Ahead, I spy rhythms unpredictably
Disrupted.
Switches left, carts amuck.

I close in on the scene
Moving straight on, no divergence
In my curiosity driven path.

A brick out
Of place. On the
Sidewalk. Angular.

Space twenty centimeters ahead
Corresponds exactly to its form.
I bend, drop it in.

Didn’t see the old man
Walking with a cane, behind me,
Four paces. Now smiles.

Boom—shuffle, shuffle.
Boom—shuffle, shuffle.
Boom—shuffle, shuffle.
Boom—shuffle, shuffle.

Asphalte at the Sheung Wan Civic Center May 30, 2010

"Pow"
Incessently spinning, balanced
on the second vertebrae past
his hoodie - historicity
the spin lasts forever
til he pops arched feline style, up
and snap - backupside down
in a handstand pose

People cluster, circling
keeping hollowed performance space
free, filled with invisible energy
jumping twirling bomabarding
tapping off one audience member
and zipping to the next as they focus on the center

sixty-two year old shopkeeper
high school basketball bench-warmer
yamaka-frocked father
his daughter, ten and wide-eyed

"Pow" pause
"pow" "POW"
curiosity creates tighter
spirals of vitality -
energy shared, charged -
one time, one space
just on the edge of containment and explosion

From Hong Kong to Boston, December 19, 2009

Ambitiously bundled
Just off the plane
Blizzard waiting, throwing
Gorgeously threatening wind
Spattered with opaque ice particles
Snow like Julia Child's omelettes
Fluffed by who holds
A handle incessantly moving
Shaking up my life - my skin
Is not used to the fifty degree fahrenheit drop
Not noticing until rosy cheeks last through next dawn

Running in a snowstorm
Better than Buddhist leg-crossing meditation
It is easy to be here
Displacement disappears

Explaining in an hour all
Abstractions - shattered self identity
Forming willfully - no longer a mirrored double
Uncanny expat expectancies, experience -
Taking shape from within
Radiating the labyrinth I've created

I cook dinner for my family
Feeding them a story
They previously only heard by phone.

Meaning of Life

Dude in a drunken

syncopated journey

to his pee tree

marches awkwardly to the music

playing on my iPod—

In Rainbows ringing,

bouncing between my ears

But he doesn’t understand—

Radiohead creates dissonance

musically and philosophically

breaking normal frequencies

to find truth

It is one-thirty

in the afternoon and much

too early to cloud your life

in momentary perfection fading

His friends sit with their backs

to the glistening rooftops

of Prague

as if this day and this sky

alternating incessantly between azure

and white making shade and sun

surprisingly cycling temperatures

was already done by them at the age

of twenty-seven

When it’s later, when

your hair has lost

the rainbow in a white-out

including all colors

(as physics tells us)

your life’s truths then

return to the

dreamworld—when realized

as MLK hoped for—

only then can you

float through life in your enlightenment found

King and Gandhi found it

after death

Buddhists reincarnate for it

but we may earlier though never

by jogging through life—

I run in infinite circles, often

changing my pace

pushed forward through

education and experiences

like death, reading Lear, cliff-climbing—

I journey across the world and carry the

minds of many students

with me, always getting me one step

closer to knowing

Listen to the People of the Sun

in Oaxaca, to the roommate

you would never have chosen,

to the political refugee from Zimbabwe

selling you a Prada bag outside

the Duomo and to all

the Weird Fishes along the way

I want to hear this drunk

man’s story,

but I don’t speak Czech.

I hope he goes back to reality

to find a better dream and die

with that everything

and that nothing

we are trying to define merely

in journey and never in the final result.

Hanoi Lake Ladies

Gyrating - in syncopated harmony
Tai chi has evolved in this country.
Vietnamese women with soft middles
Stay flexible and vulnerable
As passersby chuckle in respect.
(They jump and kick in private gyms
lacking value beyond bodily development)
I wonder who hires the instructor?
She has them: touching,
Massaging shoulders in a train...
Something is slightly naughty in this scene
As if husbands watching are reminded
Of what they should do after dinner tonight.