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.

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?