The Mask

Was our love like an Irani Cafe? Meticulously manicured, soulfully stagnant? Marble top tables and intricately woven chairs Yet nothing but dust and ash all around, Over the face in the faded photo-frame of the long deceased owner Watching over the dying eatery and the dying patrons Weeping like the storm that laced our midnight long distance calls, The tears slowly mingling with the salt of the Kheema pav and akuri. Did it also stale over time, like the hardened bun maska, Each bite more painful than the last? Like the chai working overtime, bursting at its seams With a sweetness that betrayed its loss of love and trust? Did it also stare, like the current proprietor, out at the Crumbling roads and broken cars, sighing at the possibility Of what could have been and what already was? When, with its dying light, it shuts its doors forever The chairs now being stoically stacked one on top of another Will our love too be replaced with a newer enterprise Or would it continue to stand, by itself, acting as A symbol of resilience or mockery ?

A day or two after the cremation,
 the flat Opposite ours seemed to have reverted back
 To its former aura of normalcy.
 And as the days progressed, this clockwork regularity attained
 The unnerving air of a military regime; Wet laundry dangled from a friable clothesline,
 Desperately trying to seduce the sun.
 The potted plants wilted away, ruins writhing in dust,
 Each gust of wind, merely adding to their agony.
 The pressure cooker whined, in short salivary bursts,
 Heralding the somnolent afternoon, as the utensils chuckled,
 While being bathed by the help who constantly questioned
 Her existence and her mortality. And then one day, in a departure from this lull,
 The mother of the household could be seen strolling in the balcony.
 Watering can in hand, she seemed to have aged by an eternity.
 And as we all watched, with bated breath,
She extended her hand towards a plant, 
(Her eyes all the time scanning the skies,
Searching for answers amidst the gaps in the clouds,)
 While the water, missing the pot completely and
 Drenching the wrinkled clothes hanging below,
 Fell to the ground in an angry, unearthly splash. The cremation, apparently, was now finally complete.

Every week you buy flowers to leave on the counter, and by the time they’re in water they’re thirsting. I watch you watching them while you work. I tell you you work too much; you ask shouldn’t I be working. But flowers only wilt. We both know that. Dead by Friday, a bin-bound funeral. I’m not dressed from the waist down and you laugh. Then Sunday we go back and do it again. Some are already drooping in the shop. Stem water runs down my arm on the walk home, past the gravestones we read walking Kendall: thirteen, too young. And still, flowers make people happy. Flowers make you happy. This summer we bought plants and forgot them. They sat in the study, sad like the music I insist on. Then overwatered, drowned. Sometimes I look at the flowers, or the dead plants, and want to say that’s how this feels.

coding is deterministic, consistent, safe, predictable a function that changes A to B will always do so, unless written to work any other way, cause and effect in action bipolar is irrational, chaotic, dangerous, a factory defect where the depression needs no reason or rhyme to corrupt my brain and the mania asks for no justification to overload my mind the nervous system looks suspiciously like a bundle of wires without cable ties and managers to keep it clean and orderly, illness coursing through its veins rather than data and logic to feel is to be human, but is there ever such thing as too much humanity? i try to focus on my code, despite it all, and when the program works, consistently and cleanly, there’s a pang of envy oh, won’t something come save me from myself?

To lindyhop.ph and the Lindy Hop SEA-blings, with my love.

I especially missed the absolute safety that the presence of my parents could naturally give me as a kid and how I will never be able to feel that again with the death of my dad.

I'm here To bear witness, Even against the fog. The leaves Are still a-changing, Even against the odds. I'm struggling to see How the stars align. But here, I can stop Fig'ring out what I have to find. In the winter you'll see How the animals choose to rest, And therein lies the dif'rence: They'll die before they become a wreck. I'll run To the circus, Even despite my home. The wheels Are still a-turning Within and outta my bones. Is it comforting to think 'Bout the time gone by... Or does It just terrify Anyone in their right minds? Don't you see How the trees Take their seventh day? Please, See Not the shame but the beauty Of them bare without leaves - Even water takes the excuse to freeze. Don't you see You and me Reflected in the cracks of the stream? In the winter I see The natural dulling light. In the spring-time I realized The apple is the shame of life.

A cloud floats over Anfalm. Below lie cornfields with stalks growing tall, electric wires run around the field, a cow appears in the middle, moos loudly and disappears. I feel the warmth of summer in this distant land, where all I can do is look and feel the raspberries’ red, saccharin juice dripping over the electric fence—a little spark— a fly hits the fence and dies and though it is mine, my town, my eye, somehow I can’t bring it back from death.

Published in Down in The Dirt Magazine.

Having grown up involved an extremist faith community, this poem reflects the journey of healing and recognizing that though my upbringing continues to impact me, it is no longer something I have to fear. I can feel the echoes of my journey without the fear.

Eventually, the world spun when we spoke of putting mind over matter. But how much could be understood when only the understudy was there to hear it? Yet here I am, subtly compelled to repeat it. After all, it could just be some international conspiracy approaching me. Call for emergency as I dangle from the bells that clang and clatter with a message that ultimately doesn’t matter yet still prompts us to sit and wonder whether these lives are nearly over or have the lies only just begun. There’s a cigarette burn on your arm yet you insist it isn’t there.

Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say I am that child in the photograph at Kishamish in 1935? Might as well say I am the shadow of a leaf of the acacia tree felled seventy years ago moving on the page the child reads. Might as well say I am the words she read or the words I wrote in other years, flicker of shade and sunlight as the wind moves through the leaves.