False Positive

I hate my photograph,

it is not me-who stare

at you behind the mirror.

That false reflection

with curved lips,

chinkee-eyed to greet

a hello. To whom?

 

I don’t want witnesses

to frame me in that split-second

prison cell of disguise.

I buckle down, and sweating

my bones, electrocuted,

dead nervous of strangers’

gaze into my inner being.

 

I hate questions.

I hate it when you whitewash

a harsh reality with a soft answer.

It’s a scalpel dissecting

an organ, trying to find

hidden tumor that metastasized

blood flowing a river

and then you drowned

along with drowning the negative

until it sinked in.

 

Please,  tell the doctor.

He is not welcome here.

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Writer’s Bloc

He keeps me shrouded in shredded pieces

sprawled and reclusive and momentarily

locked up vanishing in mediocrity.

 

Like someone who is afraid of the sanity

and Charles Dicken’s tale of two cities

and I never get to understand Virginia

Woolf, why her heart cries like a wolf

in the night longing for words as

earnest as Oscar Wilde. Dorian must be

some kind of lover of self and boisterous

as Ernest Hemingway. Not in the league

 

of imagination pours in my cup of tea.

Blood of ink flooding in my desk.

Days and days of wandering and wondering

where the words hide in the curtains.

That great expectation.

 

Lucky is Jane Austen for she can choose

not to be shrouded and shredded but

privileged unlike some Emily Bronte’s

Heathcliffe who tries to redeem romance.

Some hearts that pound in the will of the horse

and to kill a mockingbird of Harper Lee.

I hope to catch the rye like JD Salinger.

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Cocoon

I would like to remember

for the sake of remembrance

without fear of talking on corners

where echoes reverberate

within these four white walls.

 

I would like to visit a place

that is only half-remembered

where the streets are fading

against the foggy morning light.

 

Have they forgotten

or just being forgetful?

Frozen fingers of tree branches

on a bleak Friday morning.

Wisps of emotion numbed

by the chilly winds,

the pores of my skin

have forgotten to breathe.

 

The chances of longing

for somebody or someone

whom you have felt the time

when the blood on your veins

boil and burst with life. Inside

of you. That the world is

still a beautiful place, after all.

 

Just for this moment of expectation.

This soft prison cell will balm my soul

who wants to break out as a man

free like a butterfly

in its resplendent colors.

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Narrative of the Wounded

Wood scars fray the edges of a sanity-

house paint color gave up its loyalty

to the surface weathered by seasons.

I am a man who leans against the backdrop

of grafittis’ with vivid emotions of discontent.

About an aching hand, bloodied by history

wrapped in white bandages soaked

in spiritual rhetoric. It didn’t stop

the bitter flow.  This hemorrhage. 

While bullets of sunlight streams within

dark passages to freedom fighting,

floating clouds above charred ruins.

The innocence held captive

in the hopes of winning

a logical war for a bitter peace.

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Vigil

On a white bed, someone is sleeping dear

deep to a dreamland of no return but only

strangers and lovers peering translucent

appearing sad as if they were caged

 

by someone whose scythe has killed

and slit the necks of flowers too eager.

And push them into garland and vases

as if sudden death is a beautiful thing.

 

And  the twin blood-red moon gave birth-

two distant runners racing past each other

galloping silken terrain but their footsteps

leave no traces- only their colorless ordeal.

 

They call them tears.

 

Like lamentations of loss, a dirge, a song

wailed and escaped through cracks

and crevices of consciousness. A proof

that breath is extinguished like candles.

 

Whose spirit wafts the room to shake

and pound the doors with its fists

while the priest can no longer hear

the trite confessions of a sinner.

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Those Sisters’ Men

When my sisters began to marry their men,

I just stop talking to them. Eagerness

suddenly plummet into nil and I began seeing

an imaginary wall that divides me to them.

Those strangers’ hand snatching spaces,

of familiarity, never uttered a word about apologies.

Plundering the blood bond, the images of innocence

running away to far places where I cannot go… I hate them.

 

Suddenly somewhere appears picket fences,

territories, boundaries and cages

which were meant as a warning

not to encroach their line, their property.

And how then, for a split-second

they ruin the emotional investment

my sisters and I build relationships.

 

Ah, they would never understand

the weightier aspects more than

the union of two bodies to breed.

They would never understand how

my sisters and I share a lifetime-

that intimate part we found eversince

we are born, out of our mother’s womb.

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Specimen

We lived in a world where

statistics is synonymous

with being number one.

Measuring up in a yardstick,

struggling our lifetimes

competing for spaces

reserved for subservient

imitators of culture and class.

 

Like crabs crowding and grabbing

and pulling each other down

wanting to rule the world. People

above people. Force against force.

 

For those who dared raising a fist.

For those who questioned authority.

For those who defy their masters

raised from the land they call-

the first world. Their birthright.

 

Is it about what you’ve been taught?

Is it about how you’ve been raised?

Have I been misplaced by fate?

My skin’s darker, hands dirtied,

swollen by hard labor. A gap

so wide I couldn’t leap forward

a privilege’s bloody to break.

 

The one with the skin much paler

has the prime seat in the house.

The one whose ideals are taller than the tree

had their palms oiled by the scent of money.

And their minions bow down in worship.

 

Supremacy over self-worth. Fanaticism

over humanity. Millions, blindsided

servants to little gods awaiting benediction.

I can’t do but keep silent and curse

the soil in which you were born,

giving you a seething stare in envy.

 

Shall I borrow then, your language

slipped out of your tongue? For I will

put sounds to the syllables of freedom

to speak and tell you, “our time has come”.

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