Between an you and me There’s a Kamishbai screen Shadow figures engraved on it Prim mannequins, coded expectations Performative mindless motions Acceptable social notions.
There’s no way We can ever dare To fully meet someone On our own terms. So poems become Soliloquy Poems browse internal dialogues Verbalized, they become Dislocated skeletons Outed from the closets Of internal recesses.
I wonder what Is the purpose of A poem? Is it to show our cards, The hand we’ve been dealt? Or to hide it?
Must music of mind manifest In words? Be both Lyric and missive? Can’t unfinished business Remain, with jagged edges to Masquerade at poetry festivals? Can’t lack of complete meaning Be entirely meaningful?
I wonder why words have to Wow us.
Why do we try To connect fluid word druids With dry husked wisdom?
My free flowing mind Shrugs off beat shoulders And lotus stems clavicles Fall in love with pallid petals Your p-salms anoint me. Oh the glorious blooming then!
My mind, a blushing bride, walled Crimson spired church in a garden, Ice cream trimmed, palisade fenced, Fairy tale gingerbread cottage, Emanates portals. Now it flickers, Into green shuttered cream bungalow Its hidden emerald lawns Hates bustling hustle, narrow dinginess Falls in despair seeking heroic saviours At the lotus feet of garish pin up gods Riding horse drawn chariots, Eyes oceans of mercy, On gaudy Hindu calendars.
When I open this toy cupboard of Mind, its cornucopia tumbling out, I grab without seeing, going braille, And all I feel are dust moth wings, Satin falls of curtain, embossed, Prints of long forgotten paisley, Material patterns, effete buttery Liquid veils, crunchy lace, That, horribly hoarded, Compressed, flat out of shape, Unaired, withering, shelved- Come alive. Mindlessly suppressed Till sighs or boredom Blossomed them Into strange morphed Dream awakenings Portent of universes To come.
The Ending
A wisp of a graceful Woman Sari clad Shows off the very shape She sought to hide. Such is poetry. My piety. My ignominy. My grace My downfall. The aged diva Who dons crimson Lipstick, twirls in Flowery dupatta Accentuates only The wrinkles around Her doe eyes, Her trembling chin, Yet also highlights An age of wisdom, radiance Accumulated within. Such is poetry. My privilege. My price. My penance. The hallowed morning Shimmers dulcet silver Pealing unshed tears Crystalline cymbals Of hushed supplications. Wake up early The world is your prayer Till the blue heat dries up Cornea of visionary notions. Till mundane inanities Gate crash oasis of Dawn visitations. Such is poetry. The epiphany. Cresting monotony. The waiting In between.
At the deathbed Of dearly beloved, Fear bifurcates. A morbid curiosity. Penetrates peephole to Alternate destined portals. Opening up, one to watch The finality of Crematorium gate Coming down crashing. Swallowing her. Your world, Your mother now a mannequin In still life mirage, doll Draped by your love, Intact her statuesque dignity. Smouldering grey ashes fume in Steel grey rusty basin Steaming up to fear struck eyes Concocting concrete abstraction of Intangibility.
The reduction Of irony.
Such is poetry. My Janus. My Judas. My dichotomy. My diverse unities.
Such is poetry. My unknown Unasked Unclaimed Classified Possibility.
If the words Wow. It was their own Nature. If they let you down Then the untold poem Of my heart is Merely waiting In between experience and Expression. Cherished duality Unwilling to be Deciphered. Poetry play, is both Lock and key A cipher to decipher A code to be broken A myth to be resurrected.
Poetry shows What she wants to show. Her clemency, Veils where you Cannot go.
Patterns in the Air
Patterns of poems circle the air Breathe and pulsate to form Wreathes in my hair, Dreams woven tight in Tendrils of loss Loveliest memories in Forlorn love locks.
I feel the coiled circlet Crown my tight pain A crescent of yearning Bays broken blood moons Such lonely longings Such lovely yearnings It could flash freeze my frame.
I come to and fro From the open window The moon looks bemused, So cool blue again…
Well poetic knight You breathed love Into my bower But not your cold heart My own words Gave me power.
Patterns of poems Sparking the air Creating charge and attraction Wording heart blood so dear.
Patterns of poems That scintillate Unspoken nights Never written But forever Burnt on the mind….
Fibbing
They told me I would find you when the time was right But they all forgot to mention, that I would have to fight It’s been a nightmare in what began like a dream Maybe you hear it in the throttling of my screams? I’m growing up still, and still I’m going down Glowing, mesmerizing, till the arrival of dawn. I am radioactive, I live my half-life. Everything I emit, corrodes from inside. Laughing, giving away my own self, Dissolution’s immortal elf I’m immaterial not the real deal Ephemerons that time will seal, Till there’s nothing left to give When this ends, please forgive. Now my poet, my pretty boy It’s a plot, a ploy, a playing coy It’s over now and though I accuse, Blaming you is another petty ruse. Couldn’t you come a little cheap The price set was far too steep Couldn’t we be more than knee-deep Find our squander worth the keep?
Baby I’m fibbing. I don’t love You at all. I just need you, want you, At my beck and call. I feel like loving you, I am so needy I am just trying to feel, I am too greedy I feel like I am finished, Call it what you will. Was my love even real I’m still working out that deal.
I’m living to hope, I’m still hoping to live In love because, I’m dying to give.
I’m radioactive, I radiate my being Let me transmit you all my fears Plundered cities and corpses This agonist in tears, Let me show you hell That is worth this defeat Your presence a halo I wear as sacred sheath.
You understand me too well, Which makes this so not right My hero comes late to take a bow Shies away from my fight.
Bravehearts don’t exist, courage just an elven myth Cowards torture, then soothe to appease. Love like a gameplayer, game plan to tease When we love like that, love forecloses its lease. Give up on giving this love a name Pray it is true, not a game Make it real, make it true. Baby I am begging you.
Be a man made strong to endure Because your woman stands soft and pure Be true because my love is sure. The world cannot be its funeral pyre And all you throw at it becomes- Kindling for transcendent fire. If our lives’ songs are in harmony Breathe into my flute Life is a mad music and it Wrings blood out from the wood.
If I Were a Man
If I were a man I wouldn’t try and act tough I wouldn’t act macho Wouldn’t be loud, or brazen it out I would show my insecurity And face my doubts. I wouldn’t be part of a herd But be a natural stand out No men’s club or buddy system For me I would like to know my own mind And know that it’s free. I wouldn’t treat women differently Putting them in silly pigeonholes Like table birds or delectable chicks Wouldn’t label mothers sisters Daughters wives as goddesses And all others as easy picks. And I wouldn’t think of a woman As a face or body type A silicone doll to satiate My insatiable appetite. Honour, justice, morality Courage and confidence, Loyalty and respect are not A man’s sole providence.
If I were a man I would be As gentle as a flower
I would treasure this fleeting world Blossom upright, my slotted hour I wouldn’t hang onto youthfulness I wouldn’t suspend my willingness To age into grace and wisdom, I’d make my peace with gravity’s pace See beauty in a woman’s tired age lined face.
If I were a man I would be so much better So much more of a man Than chauvinists and patriarchs Dare imagine. Because I know He Can.
A Woman’s Song
Busy, busy, busy, busy! Not a moment to spare, Legs aching, breath hurting, Running up and down the stairs. There’s no end to household chores, Hurry home from grocery stores!
Errands to run, deadlines to meet Separate stone and chaff from rice and wheat. Clean the bathrooms! The ceiling fans! Dust and polish when you can, Do the ironing, chop the beans Cook three course meals… Then clear the dishes, begin to clean.
Cleanse and dry the swabbing mops, Lady, run around like a spinning top, Speed is priority! Perfection is not. A woman’s labour is round the clock. Yet not monetized simply because, She works for her own, it’s taboo To weigh profit and loss.
The inability to claim an idle hour To dream of loving, in flowery bowers To write one’s heart while grinding meat, Kneading dough on swelling feet. And my tears only make me weak Subjected to shaming mockery, If I say I deserve more than this-
Go out and seek a job! Do as you please, for You’re not my own kith and kin Loyalty of clan in patriarchal veins. Limited only to the men. I laugh and do just as I please Fall in love again with ease And thus Demon wrath arouse!
The claim time immemorial made Woman! Be owned Spoken for and said. You are not yours to Be, A possession possessed You must belong, To one whose heart has lost, His woman’s song.
My psychiatrist said of the Dude, as an aloe plant wilted on her desk (yes, aloe plants can wilt), and the view out the window showed a city that had been built with a sense of grandeur in marble and concrete, “He is adorable.”
The Dudesie came with me for one of my appointments. You do that for someone when you’re with them. You go to their medical appointments with them. Like when I went with The Dudesie to his eye operation. Laser surgery to melt back his detaching retinas. The surgeon said to him, “Don’t move.” And then Dr. Chen pointed the laser at his eye, and the beam of light fixed him all up.
Her family liked him. He got along with her curmudgeonly Stepfather. They had man talks at the dining room table. The Dudesie said of her stepfather, “He knows he’s doing something wrong, but he doesn’t know what.” He deferred to her mother with pleases and thank yous.
That was before she met someone whose name she could not say, because it was like that. Back then, with The Dudesie, she didn’t understand stuff like that. The Dudesie was alive, back then.
The thing about dating someone of a different culture or race is that you learn a lot about the world really quickly, a lot you’d rather not know, and your family disapproves, has no sympathy, and leaves you, not just leaves you, but acts as if they completely want to forget about you, and perhaps wish you never existed.
She tried to work it out in therapy.
She said, “He calls me Basil.”
My psychiatrist said, “Why?”
She said, “I use basil a lot in my cooking. I get it fresh from the farmer’s market.”
She said, “Healthy eating is important.”
And here, I am I and she and she is not I but whatever.
The aloe plant looked a bit more watered that day, and the light was sumptuous on a Van Gogh poster, one of cherry blossoms in France.
Jeanette said to her therapist, “Yes, it is. I don’t know what I’m doing, really.”
There was a pause in which she looked poignantly and longingly out the window at the winding city, all its streets and rooftops.
Jeanette said, “He invented something called ‘The Basil Effect.’ He says it’s when everything goes wrong. But I think that the Basil Effect is when you get it right. He was criticizing how I cut tomatoes.” She laughed.
The psychiatrist didn’t.
There was a moment.
The psychiatrist asked, “Are you in love with him?”
Even facebook knew I was in love. It asked me questions graced by a heart icon, like, “How in love are you?” And you pressed a button or something and the computer processed the timing through an algorithm and spat this out: You are ninety-nine percent in love.
My psychiatrist was a tall woman from somewhere far away and elusive. She had long black hair with bangs, and when she was very still she looked like a statue in a wax museum. She never took notes; She remembered everything. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, showing off the lace patterns in her dark stockings. Her feet looked uncomfortable in patent leather pumps. She smiled, now and then, and even laughed, but always at something unexpected, not when Jeanette was trying to make a joke. Red lipstick gave off the impression that she liked drama.
Once, when The Dudesie, my boyfriend, was alive, he joked about her looking sadistic, because that’s what the haircut meant, he said, but I don’t think it was that. I think she just liked fashion statements.
That was her Boston Psychiatrist.
When Jeanette was in Boston, The Dudesie stayed in Montreal. In a way, he was setting her free. There was an eighteen-year age difference between them.
The Dudesie, with his dark wavy hair that his hair dresser said women would love to have, with his style of jeans and a suit jacket and a plaid shirt, but tasteful plaid, lived in a basement apartment. He was living in the old one he and Jeanette lived in, but when Jeanette left, he just stayed on, and didn’t pay rent. He got evicted.
“What do I do?” He was worried on the phone.
Jeanette said, “Call Sylvie. She might let you stay in one of her condos.”
“I can’t ask her that.”
“Why not?”
He said, after a pause, “Okay, I will.”
A few days later, he called and said that Sylvie had a place for him, a basement on Le Plateau, not far from where he was, now. The place was up for sale, but when it was bought, the new tenant said it was cool with him if The Dudesie kept on living there, and then the guy’s brother moved in, also, so it was the three of them in a basement apartment, and they were happy, as far as Jeanette could tell. However, he would not allow Jeanette to visit, because there was no room.
When she and Dudesie had lived in their basement apartment on Le Plateau, the janitor once called her a “Square Head.” This was, according to Dudesie who understood nuances in French, because he was half French, a racist remark.
Jeanette didn’t really care what the janitor thought. He was a jerk. He was short and sometimes grunted. He was always digging up the floor of their kitchen to access the pipes. The janitor just said, “Go to a friend’s house.” He left his cigarette buts in the toilet.
She escaped Montreal. It was not easy. The place is its own planet with a corresponding gravitational pull. Languages mix and commingle and confuse you. You need to be ludicrously brave to say anything.
There was all the politics she left behind, gladly.
Like, “English, Go Home,” spray painted very large on the calico brick of Mont-Royal metro station, near the tacky apartment building where she and The Dudesie lived. She liked that metro station. The graffiti really got to her. In fact, it was why she made the decision to leave and go to Boston. A lot of people were leaving. She would be one of them.
After The Dudesie died, after she moved to Beantown, which she learned was a nickname for Boston, after she fell in love with that dark man on the wrong side of the fence, after, after, after, she returned to Montreal. She bounced back home.
There were American musicians at Mont-Royal metro station, making a loud ruckus, just kind of banging sounds out like they were denting an epic into metal. She recognized their type: unwelcome in Boston, unrefined, hill people, people who claimed Bigfoot was real. People who had no place in American society with its sophistication, who had perhaps heard that things like that don’t matter in Montreal. However, they didn’t speak French or have a notion of French culture, so they stood out, also, near Mont-Royal metro. They belonged nowhere.
There was one guitar player, apart from the rest.
Jeanette, yelled at him, “Keep the music real.”
And then something broke, and she didn’t know why.
To her surprise, the guitar player was totally afraid. He grimaced. People who knew what was going on in Montreal swelled around her, a crowd travelling by metro. She belonged. She didn’t completely belong, but at least she knew which way was up. The Bigfoot Band kept on making a dissonant racket. She was sorry she had said anything to the guitar player. The fear in his eyes wouldn’t go away, even though she smiled at him.
She wanted to tell him that she knew what it was like to be foreign and afraid, but now, she was home in Montreal, buying drinkable yogurt and cigarettes at Montreal metro’s depanneur.
A depanneur is what a convenience store is called in Montreal. In a corner, there was dust on an ant trap. There was cold beer in the fridge. There were three kinds of orange juice.
When The Dudesie’s funeral was over, she went back to Boston, where she was living at the time. The Dudesie always said she wouldn’t attend his funeral, but she did. There was music. There were his relatives. There was Sylvie, looking fat and blonde and beautiful. Sylvie, whom he had dated before Jeanette. Yes, he did have a life before her. There were his roommates who let him live in their basement apartment for free. Their names were Daniel and Michel. They were twins who grew up on a farm outside of Montreal.
At the funeral, she remembered that they did have fun in their basement apartment.
Her apartment (it was her apartment, not his), where she and The Dudesie had lived, had a timeless quality of feeling trapped. Perhaps trapped in a crystal ball, where you shake it all up and turn it upside down, and watch the “snow” fall on a medieval village.
As a couple, they enjoyed going to a place that was both a Wendy’s and a Tim’s, which is what everyone called Tim Horton’s, where you could get a maple Boston crème donut.
When they went down to that area of town, Dudesie usually pointed out what he called, “Medieval Swiss architecture,” but she had studied Irish architecture for some reason she now forgot, and beams of wood in the façade were Gaelic runes. There were even curved beams in the pale stucco-like building material. The buildings said something.
Sylvie, who was The Dude’s first serious girlfriend, had Swiss citizenship. Jeanette wasn’t jealous of her. She was jealous of the woman he was currently having an affair with. It royally pissed her off. She knew he was cheating, but she didn’t know with who.
It was at his funeral that she found out. It was his hairdresser.
As the guests stood around the shabby furniture, holding small plastic cups of wine, the smell of dust and stale sunlight commingling with the low chatter that was mostly French, she learned who she was, who Dudesie had been cheating on her with. Yes, it was his hairdresser, a sprite of a woman, lithe and lively, with black square glasses that made a fashion statement. It was Sylvie who pointed her out to Jeanette.
Sylvie said, in French, in which it sounds better, a bit more accusatory, “It was the woman with the glasses.” C’était la femme avec des lunettes.
Jeanette shifted in her seat. It was her anti-red dress moment. She felt like a melting scoop of ice cream on a hot summer day, even though it was September outside.
Jeanette, watching the woman with the glasses at the reception, suddenly felt a lot better. It was her. It was like finding an answer. She could stop guessing.
The reception at Daniel and Michel’s place had a seafood theme. The Dudesie would have liked that. The shrimp with the white wine. The low chitchat. He would have liked to be there.
And now, here she was, years later, in a different city. She was in love, again. Maybe she hadn’t been in love with The Dudesie. She was kind of obsessed with him, at first, when he used to come and find her on her lunch break on the outdoor deck of Le Faubourg, a shopping mall downtown, when she worked at the art supply store.
The art supply store was a good job, but misunderstandings that ultimately don’t matter happened, and she had to quit.
Now, she was technically in love, according to facebook. He was dark. He was funny. He made ADHD work for him. He was charming.
She was looking for something specific from him: what had she done to drive Fady away? Fady, whom she met in Harvard Square when he started up a conversation with her, then said he spoke French and was from North Africa; Fady, who had swept her off her feet (now she realized it was silly). He said he had lived in Paris for many years and he wanted to take her there.
Her family, after hearing she was dating someone from the other side or whatever, disapproved so much they decided not to pay for her apartment anymore. When she confronted her family, they said they stopped supporting her because they didn’t want her to give Fady money, which she was doing.
So she was homeless, just like that. It was terrifying. All her beige furniture and red pillows, red plates, red paintings by none other than The Dudesie (because The Dudesie was an artist, a painter of abstracts), yes, all her jewelry and books and stuff, all of it was thrown into a dumpster.
Before that, before she was ruined in the straight world, Fady got mad because she bought him a pack of cigarettes. They were sitting on the stone benches outside of The Boston Public Library. Pigeons assumed you would feed them. People looked happy, or lonely, or like they were just sitting there enjoying the beautiful day with the blue sky.
He walked away from her, and she knew she had lost him, and a part of herself that wanted acceptance. Acceptance from the enemy. He wasn’t really an enemy, though. She didn’t know what he was. She just knew she got him wrong, all wrong, and that was a terrible feeling.
So she hopped on a bus back to Montreal, after moving into a questionable apartment with even more questionable roommates, where she fell in love with the ADHD cool guy who lived there. The dark one, with whom she was ninety-nine percent in love. (There was a woman who lived there, too, but she was on a vacation in The Philippines.)
So, in the apartment, it was just her and him.
And then, she left. She left everything in the apartment, and took a bus out of there, and now, nowhere was home.
She was in the station with its polished floors and Au Bon Pain, its commuters who knew where they were going, and a bit of chaos, when she felt like an open book as two police officers approached her, and one of them kindly said to her, “It gets easier.”
She could travel from Boston on Montreal, going everywhere and nowhere, there had to be forgiveness.
Are you in love with him?
Jeanette didn’t answer her psychiatrist. She didn’t know what to say.
After the session, she walked down the stairs, paused briefly in the sunny weather, although there were some moody clouds on the horizon, bought a coffee to go, and sat down and wondered what the word, “yes” meant.
In my dream you were dying. I didn’t know yet that you are dead. In my dream you rested. I sat by you in an unfamiliar room in my dreams I watch you die again and again, I experience the worst pain I have ever experienced which wasn’t my pain but bearing witness to the pain my mother felt as she died and I dream again and again every night again and again her death in a different way all slow quiet nightmares. In my dream you were dying and I woke to google the etymology of nightmare and stared at the results which say “Middle English (denoting a female evil spirit thought to lie upon and suffocate sleepers): from night + Old English mære, incubus.” And I think of the words god and death and again I experience the worst pain then try to shut it out and my body rests and your body rests and my sleep’s suffocated by your absence and I think of my ancestors and how I speak their conqueror’s language and how many mothers of my ancestors have died in my dream all of my ancestors are dying. I have betrayed their languages by speaking the imperialist language but from modern to middle to old English I cannot express how much pain there was in your breath. I cannot express the starvation in your stomach. I cannot express the thirst in your throat. I can only convey your death through stating the inability to do so in my dream you die, in my dream you are dying in my dream you died, in my dream you have died in my dream you were dying. You are dead and it’s not a nightmare.
Please Speak
Mother, visit me in my dreams.
Labhair le do thoil.
I miss your face and your voice.
Labhair le do thoil.
I won’t be afraid if you appear.
Labhair le do thoil.
South Philly Casualty
My mother’s mother’s mother Marion Carr was murdered in South Philadelphia in 1980.
A man pointed his rifle out of a rowhome window aimed at a crowd across the street.
My great grandmother sat in the passenger seat of a nearby parked car sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
The bullet that killed my ancestor tore through her skull.
A .22 caliber round marauded her temple and mauled the mind of Marion.
While relaxing in a station wagon on Oregon Ave. Drinking coffee. Marion at seventy was shot through the head
Of course the sky opened up on the day of Marion’s funeral. Of course the sky bled rain upon the procession.
Thousands appeared outside of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel on the corner of Third and Wolf. Men guarded the church doors.
My father and others had to block the entrance to the church from journalists.
Neighbors wore hats knitted by her. Her daughters wept numbly under a blanket of barbiturates.
The grief would swell beyond years. The trauma would implant into cellular structures.
DNA transformed. Tragedy underwritten. My great grandmother’s murder sleeps within me.
Grief Painting Haibun
When I imagine the cemetery where my mother is buried, I can see the ocean from her grave, but in reality, that is not the case. Instead, houses, trees, and hills block the view of the sea, and the closest body of water is the Cape May Canal, not the Atlantic Ocean. The United States Army Corps of Engineers constructed the waterway during the Second World War in order to create a safe haven from Nazi U-Boats that stalked the coast. Now, only yachts and dolphin watching cruisers use the canal. If and when the sea overtakes the Jersey Shore, I imagine this point will stay afloat, the cemetery’s height on the slope of the hill becoming an island amid ruins of submerged vacation homes. It will happen both gradually and suddenly, as we stand in the middle between the time of the last catastrophe and the next. I look up from my mom’s gravestone and see the moon rising in the east from the Atlantic Ocean and the sun setting in the west beyond the Delaware Bay. Everything that is man-made is monotone: gray monuments to the dead, houses painted white, black asphalt holding summer heat, chain link fences reflecting starlight off steel silver. Everything that is natural is multi-tonal: greens of grass and trees, the layered watercolor sky blues, yellows of corn stalks in the field beyond, my arms and hands that are covered in scars of pinks. Even natural and man-made sounds differ. Every bird chirp is unique. Every car driving in the distance is the same. I walk off from my mom’s grave toward my parked car and the smells of the grass and sea salt air transform suddenly into the plastic and metal interior of an automobile. I say, “I’m sorry, mom,” and drive away from the weight.
a skeleton rests at the bottom of the ocean
It Will Be Fire
Three in the afternoon on Good Friday with comforting silence in knowing death. No approaching thunderstorm will last the night. No maelstrom will wash away humanity. No water will lay waste to civilization. No matter how high humans make seas rise. No, we will not drown. We will burn. It will be fire. Three in the afternoon and I am burning alive by the comforting silence in knowing death.
Walking around Takoma And seeing everyone out With their healthy dogs, That used to be him.
At a Work Event
The other day At a work thing One of his colleagues Said hey How’s London, And he Had trouble Looking directly At the person When he told her That he couldn’t Talk about it.
Impeccable
More often Than not Eating chips Or crackers Puts London On his mind If she wasn’t There already, He loved sharing Snacks with her And they liked So many of The same things, She was a Refined lady With impeccable taste.
Some Days
There are days When he wants To be taken From this earth, Ready to move on So that he can Go look for London But he knows that London wouldn’t Want him To come find her Until it’s truly The right time, Until his body Is falling apart While his spirit Remains undiminished.
Right
His now ex-wife Used to accuse him Of favoring London Over the other dog And even her kids, He never engaged With what Was obviously Intended to be A criticism Of him But she was right.
Dog Cone
Those times London needed To wear a Dog cone And she’d always Let him Put the Dog cone On her And then As soon as It was on She’d always Give him A look That said Dad What are You doing, Dad Come on, Please remove me From this prison.
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