New Directions

Work I

i know the answers
and yet it is the questions
who share my breath.

and well-wishes and worries
from brothers and sisters
set on foot and fins
over barren mountains and fishless seas
searching, and finding me
here
where i have been abandoned
again.

imagined perhaps, but like a blind man
i grope for the avatars of their absence
and i discern the shape of their sadness,
a sadness of futility when it comes to me,
such were in abundance
even when i was among them.

some attempt to ignite
my cold and silent lips
to flicker with a smile
by reminding me of the scent of the flowers
of what was there
before the petals lost their breath and fell
and went to neverwhere.

it is not as if they are forgotten
of another
fingers discovering my own
of wet lips against my chin
the sound of a smile
and the color of her voice
but they are all
like the twin photographs of twin souls
held by the glass
abandoned
inside the corners of the frame.

it is not as if one
could not endure solitude
but the fangs of abandonment remains
and its poison nourishes
the questions that blossom and wither
like nights and days
with my every breath.



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Work II

the dead masters
whom we all revere
whose words we listen to
between lines and whispers of turned pages
never found themselves like seeds
waiting, enclosed and held
in the shell of poetry
workshops.

even from among the letters
of pablo and rainer
all i could find
were encounters with friends and foes
births and deaths of so many things
whose throes ripple and echo
traces of memory, dream fragments
and so many days and nights,
even between the arms of lovers
solitary
all which became the elements
seeping deep
past their shells of flesh and bone
that nourished the seeds
that bore the fruit of their poetry
from where we feed.

i have been to workshops before
among men whose works i admire
but they told me what i already knew
of the things i know i don’t
that i am groping blind in the light
with more than just open eyes
they were all lost as i am
in deciphering the origins.

they are only
lost and deciphering
longer than i am.

and yet i hunger to be in a workshops again
not because they have or can teach me anything
but only to be with the lost ones
to trade among ourselves stories

of our solitude,

of why we endure seeing and feeling
when we could have chosen to be blind and deaf

of the mystery behind the madness who shape
men into becoming like mothers,
the births of our formed and malformed lines

whom we have to teach and nurture
until they could live and walk on their own
even after we are all gone.