Radio Silence (Father)

I want to write a song with you,

but it’s been over twenty years

since we’ve even had a meal,

or been to the cinema together.

Twenty years since I’ve wondered

what your face looks like if it smiled,

if only you did, then maybe

I wouldn’t be here looking for words

a whole ocean away,

while you’re there looking
at the keyboard on your cellphone,

wondering if it’s really technology

that’s made it so hard to write your son,

in that second floor apartment

I’ve only been to a couple of times—

the stairs must kill your back now,

but I’d never know,

your face never tells any stories,

or jokes, or words. There’s no lyrics

between us, no nostalgia

we could hum to,

just a silent chat screen we both stare at,

every once in a while.

Metaphor for a Friday Night

Your hands are clever,

I get that now, it’s not

just the sexy guitar riffs

or knowing when to rev those

highway near-death takeovers.

I got it when

your tequila persuaded hands stumbled

in the dark

all over my body

but somehow avoided to acknowledge

my sex, my name.

I get it now, your hands,

their resourcefulness and their ironic desire

for hairless body heat in the tropical east,

and maybe even

the metaphor of intertwining fingers—

That’s all I was, a metaphor

for sexual blindness, or ignorance;

a metaphor for

(your words)

a man’s Friday night.

Three Poems for the Nightstand

Straight/Lines

You were straight
lines parallel to my entity

and parallelism is meant to be

two beings on paths moving side

by side, having the same distance

continuously between them,
unchanging

as fact,

or so I thought even when

our bodies rested
on your bed, the patterns

of the mattress laid out a grid

marking our space respective

before

your penis introduced a perpendicular

that’s made maths,

or sexuality,

no longer important.

*

Sex Sounds

Was there a point to try

and harmonize the rhythm up and down

of my head on your cock;

saliva, tongue, on skin— unbearable sex sounds

with the moans that escaped

your lips, so dark I could barely see

my name over and over

reflexively whispered,

your eyes closed,

mine opened.

For just a moment

I thought I heard assonance

in our separate sex noises playing

at different time signatures,

and harmony

in resolutions that never came.

*

The Mourning After

I woke up 

to the sweetness of

courtesy Listerine on your breath,

your arms still holding my head

in the coarse black hairs of your chest

where I tried to search for vacancy

in the dark of this graveyard

to mourn the half bottle of whiskey

that we didn’t get to drink last night,

still standing on your nightstand.

Sofa

It has to be a sofa,

no guestrooms or blow up mattresses,

and preferably canvas

with lots of cushions and a throw

that can easily turn into a blanket

for those 3am nights.

It also need stains—

chocolate pressed by a lover’s body,

blood from an embarrassed friend,

biriyani from a drunken hookup;

a loved furniture, if you may.

I want to add my own stain onto your sofa,

maybe wine, or the tears

that inevitably run

for our first hello’s, and our last goodbye’s.

I want to leave something there, permanent,

as if to say I’m sorry for being absent, sorry

for missing the nights you had to fall

asleep on your own on this sofa covering it in

solitary sweat and tears,

when I should have been there

as a reason, a reminder

that you have a bed to sleep on, to love on.

It has to be a sofa,

something about the way it allows me to sink in

with just enough resistance lets me know

I am loved.

Red Envelope

Fifty dollars; a hundred dollars.

Same bills I gave her

a few weeks back, all stuffed

neatly in a Chinese red envelope.

It’s for you birthday, and Christmas,

and Chinese New Year, all together

she said. Even though they are

at least six months away.

That’s what our love has become lately,

cram-packed in a week or so

and paid out in advance,

no room for words,

no space for debate,

anything more

it would just tear, and break.

Supine on a mid-Manhattan rooftop, watching raindrops fall from the cloudy morning sky.

You covered your hair in the beginning,

and masked your voice an octave lower, as though

you’d expect me to forget the burning sunrise

and the aria coming in on ocean waves.

You have always been a better actor

than you were a liar—no,

that doesn’t make sense,

but did any of “us” make sense that night?

Does an overhead covering that leaves gaps for rain

to fall through make sense? Does a city sky

that never gets dark, but somehow lights up again,

make sense?    

Mirror

I didn’t think pain could be particular

until I was cut with these shards of a broken mirror,

one that I felt more willing to shatter than to look into

to see how good it feels, to know exactly where

the scars lie and how they got there.

It never occurred to me that a face so close to mine

could end up as art on my bedroom wall.

Was it the understanding of burden

that comes from the unbearable lightness of

having a wordless father,

or from knowing the silence felt by your own songs

sung only in the language foreign to your mother?

What’s the point of

a mask of lifelong inadequacy, a voice

of timid words, a skin too afraid to scar

but hides hundreds underneath. And why

all of a sudden, is that so fucking beautiful?

Sapiosexual

It’s everything

about his human make up,

but nothing of his mankind.

When we embrace

it’s not the structural difference

but the scent of a mid-summer day walk,

the kind with watching turtles swim in a mossy pond,

that I notice in his t-shirt;

the imprint of his strong yet delicate fingers

grasping for the ambiguity of posture

on my lower back;

the bass he deliberately adorns

onto the mezzo of his voice.

Why have I never wanted to write

obsessively about

the biology of a flower, like I do

on the physiology of man,

until now?

NYC Thought

I’m too old.

I’m too old to pretend I like bird songs

over train track rattles at 5am;

sunshine over dim subway lights.

I’m too old to blame the F train

for wanting to sleep over.

I’m too old for American accents

to be a reason I write poetry,

but yet I do.

$10K Lullaby

What's calling me
but the street lullabies of Mongkok,
those car-less roads allowing only footsteps
to traverse the entangled constellation mess of
tourists bargaining at market stalls--
foreign voices unyielding and tongues
unfamiliar to my eight year old ears

all translated
into the Mid-levels vernacular—
cynical, mature, inebriated
and desperate suits and high heels
stumbling in a concrete maze
slowly flooding with yellow street light,
but somehow
finding me on top
of this high-rise metaphor,

first time sleeping in a foreign bed
in the twenty odd years since I've left
this place, restless and in need of the lull
of all that’s happening outside the windows;

all the drunken mind numbing bliss,
all the bedtime stories I've missed.