Achewood

I.

If you ask me again

then you do not know.

There are certain truths

that I keep sacred,

three laws that I abide:

Do not steal, do not

inflict harm upon

your fellow men,

do not delay love.

Rules are my way of coping.

II.

In asking for forgiveness

I forgive--

or unlearn hatred,

to capture the rhythmic

cadence of your breath

once more I long.

This is the nature of

silence.

III.

The last breathing tombs

on this earth are eternal

constructs

they manifest the degree

of my sorrow and forgetfulness.

I embrace the natural laws

of regret

but of love,

I'm sorry.

I avoid the sound of leaving.

IV.

Maybe, we are sealed

in our own bodies

and it is our

soul

that aches

I read this poem on the last day of our politics at the margins class in Taumbayan.

  Distance: A Triptych

“The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them.” (Walt Whitman)

Things unsaid will come into passing, Lowly, into the tunnel vision of that

being that is weak in spirit; a soul that prays, weary.

At night--

the shapely things, the squadron cars, the islands of my despair.

The city pulls me from under the street light

and just like that-- like this, “You will never miss

something more than what has been taken from you.”

I go unloving. The harrowed streets. The silk of leaves.

The taste of hallowed nothings in your mouth.

Eyes that pass through those blue tinted-windows

of high rises and lower castes.

The ghost of every nuanced kiss or drawl of the unrepentant drunk.

Neglects tastes like four years of perpetual uncertainty.

Depression is the heightened awareness

of being alone with your body.

Maybe the gears of your inner organ cannot emulate pain

even as the mechanisms howl for a name but yes,

I understood as I plunge into the senseless reimaginings

of a past, an orifice, a symbol.

Indifference is cruelty.

–

Home.

A hundred beats on 22 sq. ft per minute.

The top floor of an elevated shoebox.

Two windows, one bathroom. Living space.

A shadow of voices shifting the air from the rail of disaster.

Cloaked in the afterlight--

the ways you undress my intricacies cannot fill

even half the bastion of this loneliness

because I've been looking at you from a distance

thinking

every individual is a colonized, rezoned, reclaimed, island.

All men are myths,

every meeting akin to observing eclipses.

Eyes cross, hands touch but every thought

cross-pollinates with the dreams

of someone else's life.

–

I measure things by their distance from the south.

Lithuania. The moons of Jupiter. Seabed of the alien Atlantic. Our house.

Those I can fit in the soft enclosure of my heart. Paper clips,

ballpoint pens-- my mother's redeeming loveliness. The

smell of buttered toast and listerine on my father's shirt.

Brothers, sister. Even the relatives of my relatives.