The Walk

9am breath

unbrushed and still 

alcoholic, under the hazy sun

two steps I take stumbling onto the soi 

making me already

too hot. But I miss this,

these Bangkok morning-afters 

where the humidity rushes 

up at my face like

paparazzi, tuk tuk drivers honking—

camera flashes, like I'm

the most important person 

to walk the runway.

Songkran

I’ve always wondered

how my heart ignites in this water festival,

it’s a circumstantial irony,

an antithesis to desires that people like to say,

they burn.

Maybe it’s all the water splashing,

all the puddles that would never become

if not for the outpour of the liquid readiness,

where my feet barely register

their own footsteps, where they get lost

over all those dripping afterthoughts,

leading me back

to that same street, the same dark alley

where I thought colours don’t matter—

they never mattered.

Yet this time, somehow,

fire happened

in a Mediterranean sky

reflected on the still ocean water

of your eyes.

Why do I care that it was you,

when I can’t even differentiate between

my sweat,

your sweat,

and the rain that is falling upon us?

Bangkok II

It was the hot air getting off the plane, 
the dramatic contrast of climates 
just several hundred kilometers could make.

What meaning is there anymore 
for two people to be on the same land 
if the feeling can be so foreign, 
if the atmosphere could feel countries, or kingdoms, apart?

It was never the noise, nor the people, 
but always the motion sickness inside a taxi— 
the stagnant interior of an insufficiently air conditioned heart break 
and the arrhythmia of this city's traffic;

It’s the ebb and flow of this city, 
the heroes and the villains you become in this city,
that you miss.