When Props Fall Tumbling Down

When Props Fall Tumbling Down

You are reading a book about your life
It is your life as you write it
You write your life with every thought

And with Foucault of all your morality
You make do and act upon the ideas
Encapsulated in the book of your mind

And it’s not your mind, it’s a book
That was written while you were sleeping
You were sleeping in an experience

Since four AM with just a candle glowing
The background changes and you get older
And the decades don’t feel the same at all

And you are still writing and I’m still living
But if I read about you in quicksilver fluidity
Would I ever see your eye in this strange theater?

We are all spotlights in our dream, hustlers
On the purple sidesteps of what it means to be human
And I’m not alone or everyone is just like me

Or both, and it’s a question of perception and authorship
Did you write me into your story or vise-versa?

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.

What Would The Ancients Say

Of Gods and Strangers

I dreamt of lost vocabularies
Lines of poet-monks
Dialects of the Tao
Encoded in obscure Buddhist texts
Mantras of the Rishis
Wisdom of the ancients

Sanskrit whispers of sages
I have heard them all in my imagination
Or, the forgotten dialect of heart
In modern man, whose hunger
For profit is a world-destroying greed
A few generations, so much lost!

I dreamt of slow locomotives of
Quantum physics, artificial-intelligence
A million times more intelligent
Than the collective intelligence of all humans
And all this comes to pass
Progress, industry, prosperity, technology

I saw them all, existing in a relative permanence
That was as fragile as an empire
In ancient times, each one thinking itself immortal
I dreamt of the prophecies of Mayan priests
On the scorched Earth where our descendants
Mourned, for their inheritance

Our legacy and our people, were yours
I dreamt the past and the future as one moment.

The Silent Revolution is Inevitable

– Pictured, Tina Chang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Chang)

Ascent of Asia

I am haunted by how little our children
Know, what we have done
To each other, to those we deemed
Beneath us, to the Earth…..

How a republic falls and how
Democracy can lie, how News can be distorted
How money hides its debt
By printing more, by pretending we are alright

Or worse, an old idea of Nationalism
Idols of a world out dated, euro-centric
I’m haunted by how little
Millennials realize Asia is the new Queen

Why do they not learn Mandarin, Korean?
We forever think we are the center
Of the globe, but I’m not a daughter
Or a son of East or West

I am haunted by how little writers
Write about revolution, about change
We cannot always repeat what others have said
We cannot always unravel in our

Personal voice, there’s a secret stairway
To broader concerns, more existential themes
There, the ultimate fiction is reality
There is a new world ready to be born
Will you join?