$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?

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.

Residency

I didn't bother to look
through the piles of papers that were still there--
pictures, playbills, greeting cards, relics from the past;
everything that you held dear,
everything transparent.

I wonder if it was intentional.

I remember the first time I came over,
that was when you put it up,
my little laminated poem,
next to your MetroCard, and several other
memorabilia from the great city,
there I was.
I thought I had joined the club,
that I had claimed some sort of a residency
as your New York poet.

Maybe I took it for granted,
maybe I was too proud of my citizenship to realize
that even with the state ID in my wallet,
even with the phantom New York accent on my tongue,
I should have opened my lips
a little wider when you asked me to,
the first time we kissed.

But I was too obsessed
with the black and white of your hair,
the frosted asphalt of city streets I
remember thinking must be
so soft,
so unbelievably forgiving,
until I fell face first into it.

Suddenly, no longer a lullaby
are the city lights, the traffic lights,
the gunshots, and the subway trains
crossing over the Manhattan bridge--
I wish (you) were still above me.

Two poems on nostalgia

Clean

In the bathroom mirror
I saw the shadows, the stains, and
the scars left on my body
after I had tried to grasp onto
parts of you that I wanted to imagine as eternity--

The soap was pearlescent when it came
out of the dispenser;
it was only when the bubbles appeared,
and the lather on my skin turned pink, then red
did I wish
if only forever could feel so slippery on my hand,
a lifetime so easy to wash away.

"Visiting" (Ending Credits)

White lettered
words, names
sinking slowly into
my heart,
not quite pitch black
but close,

as there is no room
for voices, no time
for limbs, no place
for faces,

five seconds
to show each person,
an entire body
abstracted on a screen,
no soundtrack,
just grey.

Description Obession XII

I don't know when it started,

whether it was the sleepy look you had

or the scratchy voice you claimed unusual,

somehow I refuse to believe

that you don't naturally sound sexy—

the tenor range smokey as though afraid

someone would discover

the fragility of your light blue gaze.

Light not in hue,

but in weight, mass,

your reluctance to gravity,

and all the earthly elements that try

to pull you down and keep you.

No, they can't, and neither could I

because your entity is beyond slumber,

beyond the human desire to rest

and become one with the quiet night,

the pitch darkness.

Your mind simply do not allow it,

you exist as a singular subject

parallel to the never-sleeping earth;

you recognize the simultaneity of day and night,

just like you understand how dangerously close

love and hurt lies

on opposite sides of a coin.

But your hair,

the disheveled calm after a sandstorm,

or just the softest sandy brown I've ever felt,

how it contrasts with the fullness of your facial hair

speckled in grey

and an overwhelming sense of delayed urgency,

like an accident that's sorted itself out

over time, and pain.