Israel

It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel’s attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.
~ Alice Walker

In the beginning of the last autumn
i brought from a thousand black eyes
the prize of war, that is mercy

there is no lesson here, only
an alluring figure, death and migration
I watched the shelters get bombed
And I thought I’m too old a sculptor

to know how to sculpt dead
corpses of children, to see
how they lay motionless in

bright pools of blood
how can there be cease-fires
when civilians must beg for peace
while western masters give them arms

in the beginning of the end of frozen summer
from every woman I borrowed
a supple curve, not for pregnant wishes

but for tears of the world
i created you from the marble of my poem
but I could not contain your wasted lives
so long as men think they are superior

to other men, they will fight to the death
snubbing their own God with their cruelty
beware! The wrath of the earth

will not tolerate this forever, maybe for
a few more decades, but judgement
will it be allowed to echo in your quietness?
You who have taken the bodies

You who have committed the war-crimes
You whose mouth is cold with death?

THIS ALLEGED AND FORMAL VULNERABILITY

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Alouette-Lake-472214396

What a little bruised fate
is our story, not so harsh
just loving out of necessity
in order to survive we choose to live
in a heart, with all its comfort

a little late divinity for
an uneventful youth, where
we were not lucky to find a big love
you see, we are more fragile
than we thought, and life is more

austere in the next decade
than we ever imagined possible
no wonder those folk are so stern
life has beaten them down
from the inside, and they are vulnerable

more vulnerable than they would
have imagined, at twenty, at thirty?
but you and I, we have learned
to deny the gloom, to shut the door
to sorrow, like children in a make-believe

we call our soul a shared marriage
it’s a kind of journey in gentleness
to despair together is no longer misery
it’s what we call a journey, every sweet
month, this lifetime of acceptance

forgiveness, and gratitude, it’s like family
they don’t always tell you what
they have lived, but somehow you know.

Dreams of Flower Corpses

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.
~ Khalil Gibran

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/O-472291540

We were all dreamers it would seem
we made our myths and spent
nights in the middle of them
until dawn broke our even
darkening-shapes, because

it took an entire life to decline
or go insane, or might I awaken?
the night dragged our covers
off of us, out of the light
we felt the sleep of our routine

enfolding us like eerie fingers
from some window, or control-panel
might we have been enslaved long ago?
by whom or the government
we still flicked with our ghostly beams

seeking more intelligence, faith, energy
to be who we required destiny
to shape us, our souls knew
the secrets of our mortality
we were dreamers and I swear

we created melodies out of our own fears
musicians of fate, jennies in training.

On the decline of literacy

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”
― Malcolm X

All these stanzas look alike
they talk about the same things
with the same words, the same poem

written over and over again
like voices, whispers, copying each other
unable to feel and trust experience
differently, socialized for homogeneity

unified but dull, strong but obedient
their writing seemed the narratives
of machines unable to innovate

plagiarizing voices they believed were
their own, authentic, pure
their literary journals were a politics
of masters of arts and agendas of contests

like car commercials without a proper
enjoyment of speed, or our favorite writers
whose names we only knew because

they were the ones who died at the right time
while somebody was looking, reading them
but the bookstores didn’t know their
metaphors were weak, or their life’s work

was merely symbolic, that’s the thing isn’t it
poets are only symbols, as poems are only
fluff, paper, the labor of writers-in-residence

while the rest of the world are more
interested in serial killers and which stocks
might be worth getting into, and when to sell out
investing in words seemed silly to them

and, in my selected works there was nothing
of how to be a Poet Laureate or how to win prizes
exceptional or not, publication was left to amazon

state grants, fellowships, visiting writers
academics who never felt truly how to write
poetry at its heart was a colonization of artists
few could share what that meant, we were

the first illiterate generation, spending more time
with the internet than with books.

EYES

I don’t know the etiquette
of how eyes meet or for the first time
if they sparkle especially or

if I wore glasses the first time we met
I know I saw you with my intrinsic
looking as if I could pierce
your inner beauty, nor am I biased

I don’t know the business of eyes
beauty has been so over-rated
for so long, thanks to an evolution

but I know the last time
I look inside my heart, you’ll be there
with Asian eyes as deep as
India, China, Japan, Korea

so distinct like laughter of another culture
i don’t know the etiquette of eyes
but mine are drunk brown

not twin-cold blue or milk of salt
but chesnut-star, desire with the tip
of reaching across the universe.

Photo courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/The-Night-s-Eyes-II-129117202