We’re all from immigrant fathers

We’re all from immigrant fathers

I’ve been busy I must admit
Performing an autopsy on my shadow
It’s a tedious tumbling of self with not-self
And I’ve come to the conclusion

That it might never be finished
That I might have to live this skin

Of bone-flower-elegy of psyche
I’ve been too busy trying to be grateful
Moon stiches and a refugee of the sun
My body is slowly collecting lightning

And sound from this dimension
Like a magnet for the magical realism

I’ve started to remember dreams for
Maybe the first time in my life
With a magical aspect of eroticism
From which I believed myself immune

There is a serene aspect to feeling abnormal
A little illegal, a little uncouth

We were all bohemians in our own minds
Our conscience filled with pink juxtaposing
The encounters of thumb with mouth
Nipple with chest, facial hair with the mirror.

F o o t p r i n t s of Loneliness

F o o t p r i n t s of Loneliness

I am hunted by my father’s lack of approval
And haunted by my mother’s naiveté
How a family can live on inside
A psyche, for good or ill, but one day

Our parents die; we may even lose touch with a brother
The empire in which we were born
Might lose its world-power and prestige

Taunted by a ruined name, we live on
With each version of our childhood we remember
We must pass a threshold of regret

And carry a student’s debt into the decades
I don’t know if it’s secrets which I carry
Or simply the dread of ancestors and descendants
The broken chain that started with me

Hypnotized by shadows, too poor to settle anyhow
Our ovaries will dry up one day
And my fleshy handle won’t be operative

If I were a dream you could say I unravelled
My mortality, but truth does not matter here
Only that answers we tell ourselves at the end of a long day
And the souls who save us with kindness and security.

Let us look to the bend of the road

Pictured, the talented and gorgeous Tina Chang, Poet Laureate of NY.

Let us look to the bend of the road

Last night I found my face spilled
With the water of palms older and lines wilder
It seems they changed a little over night
The dawn is sometimes mischievous

Her light is a wounded pink as if,
Not truly ready for morning or new breath
For this world can be ugly, her children
Brash and unruly, fighters in their own right

Like a short woman of Asian descent who must
Fight for everything she has gotten
Taking gender studies classes has a majesty of bite
In her words, like a daughter who marries late

And berates others for mispronouncing her (Bengali) name
Identity is birthright, part destiny
And waking life is sometimes more burden then cheer
Some of us fake the drama and others seek it out

To feel alive drive home the muse
But the water doesn’t always turn to wine
And the frustrated authors don’t always turn out right
A silver blur across the skyline and you hit 30

The idea of revolution wasn’t holy
It was a necessary invitation to danger
To change the world, you have to risk everything
Loveless one, Sani, divine-child

We live on timetables that summon nothing
Tired of waiting and wanting, the clocks
They will run out, and we’ll be tired
It’s all nothing but a passage, lovely minutes only
When we start writing again.