Thoughts While Shopping

Two friends are having a rhombus
the edges have yet to be seen
or perceived beneath bellyfat;
she's given up chocolate, caffeine,

and traded all jostle for docile
at the first sight of ultrasound pics;
she fears her stomach colossal
and craves dill pickles and lemonade mix

but she can't get 'em herself; he has
to bring it, awoken out of cold slumber
and he lumbers downstairs to the kitchen,
his dreams disturbed and nighttime encumbered

while we all silently wonder about the photos,
about the kid's future appendages and hair --
noting the ultrasound shows neither
and wonder whether it's fair

or even whether l'il rhombie is his?
I mean, our friend's so paunchy, the fetus
geometric. Should he get a DNA test,
ask for her full sexual treatise . . .

and as we buy baby blue clothing
with big eyes and Japanese bunnies
we picture the oblique-angled gigolo
and whether our friend'll pay that support money.

Duet

It's a hospital: the way visitors talk about
anything but illness is the language we share,
talking about so-and-so's newest whoosit and
say-and-say's trip to wheelay. It is cowardly.
It is wholesome. It is the way people are

when just too much lies between the lines,
when each feels the stakes are too high,
too desperate to attempt to say what is in
our hearts, what crouches in the back
of our minds, waiting for the utterance

which will free it from its chain of longing
and solitude. Instead it continues: we watch
movies, talk music, and avoid those pregnant
pauses where nothing is said because we fear
everything could be.

On Love Amongst the Rice Fields

Those roads shrink to the size of minds,
their shoulders broken, their edges cracked and ridges raised,
and the cold kisses each imperfection.
Here rice fields lie burned in renewal
of once and future stalks.
Here arguments run in circles
around pained eyes and moaned looks.
Here the denizens set feet on tatami and shiver
without end for a love that might go on forever.
Here stances will soften, and compassion
creeps into locked hearts, all quiet-like
on cat-feet, and the past will fall away.

Some Love for Blake and Curry

Bay leaf, bay leaf floating bright
amidst the rueful onioned night
preserved in box and fridge and then
microwaved to heat again.

electionend

the anger we leave in floorpuddles we leave
to remind us of our settling hearts
while our running noses remind that sickness
still sits in the room, that the whispers
remain insistent with twice the to-dos
because now we believe in something
to come, with something to do instead of
daring fate, instead of walking under white
ladders and pacing down black
cats because bulletproof we weren't,
though committed we felt, nothing had changed

The Remains of Japan

Only after
the knife sliced hilt deep
into the side
of Inejiro Asanuma did
the bodyguards come,
refs throwing a flag
on retaliation but missing
the original crime,
not unlike bodyguards
on Jerry Springer.

Live the grainy transmission
showed a nation divided
in its politics and its people,
divided enough to want to fell
"the human locomotive" rather than
include him, felling a man
whose mother perished at birth,
whose father perished at 42.

The granite around Inejiro's grave
is warmed with green and bloom,
flora not normally associated
with a man who'd meet with Mao,
a man who'd stand up to the nation
that cratered the Earth.

And the seventeen-year old who
evaded the "bodyguards"? Let's
lump him in here too as someone
who'd die for a cause, a country.
Now I stroll Shibuya and
Harajuku and see a dress-up race
distracted by neon cell phone
yellow cab phantorgasmia, and wonder
about its focus, its root,
its future.

Last

The image of oxygen mask cloaking the wheeze
reappeared in dreams
and about this the grandson would wonder for ages,
at night sinking beneath grandmother's flannel sheets,
even cupping hand over mouth as he breathed
under three blankets, a comforter, an afghan
taken from the foot of the grandfather's empty bed.
The exercise felt like scarcity, like taking on water
but the boy would will himself to hold the pose, hold it,
hold it until lungs burned, til fear gripped. When
the plug was pulled the boy remembered grandpa held
for a good eight minutes; later the uncle would whisper:
every man has his limit. The words fell without
emotion, and the dark judgment stuck like the
linseed gleam in the ICU. Where would mine be,
the boy wondered, where would mine be?

Dogeza

Here comes some fun: got the hundred yen dust
pan with the bristle brush wires, scratching.

On the floor dogeza style, hand circling
an orange mitt, scrubbing off every missed

glance, every misstep, every misspoken word
and every broken relationship. My back's in it

now and I'm sweating, sweeping clear the years
on a Saturday afternoon, preparing for move-out

day, steadying, readying to do what people
say they do when in truth everything stays

with you. By five the sun is down and I
in my slippers and cheap convenience store

tee settle down, crack open a Yebisu, listen
to the blackbirds chirp memories, drink in

the solitude of the newfound darkness.

Estudillo Blues

Why all these people?
Why now, when the past has to go,
does traffic on the Hayward Split
creep? I have left Oakland,
put the white crosses on
the hilltop in the rearview,
and now? The sun. In a five
o' clock blaze its corona
bursts from behind a cloud. I

think I am going to burst, think
the car's gonna pop, and I pull
over by the smorgasborg off the freeway,
pop the hood, hoses gone wilynily.
I walk around, spot something in the backseat.
A book? Shirt? Whatever. It can
be returned, without remorse,
minus forgiveness, and I won't
give a shit if I could just

not burn my oversized hand in the
undersized engine bay but heat that tat
on the ringfinger, but what's
it gonna look like when highway patrol
pulls up -- when John Law adjusts
his belt cinch and gets on the bullhorn
and watches a guy peer into the engine bay,
grit his teeth, press finger to hot
engine block til skin starts to sizzle?

o' clock repose

i am ashamed at the dust,
ashamed that words can say so much
yet give too little, and my insomniac
heart yearns to have its words
received so it can fall asleep

because blood doesn't care about spare
diet or desertions, just about
getting its heartfelt message
across the dam we build between one
another, and within ourselves

because in an age of telex and zeroes
and ones the heart feels that only
what passes from pulse to pulse
and lip to lip makes a group of given words
hang, dangling, patient, waiting, waiting ...