felices

the candles spark atop my cake, christie says, like
stars
i imagine the tops of trees in the amazon burning,
all the way down to the root
make a wish, christie says
and i do, i wish i could think of something else in
this moment, anything except henry

henry

legs trapped under the dash
useless,
blood coating the drivers seat like syrup
smelling of metal
his solitary heart, the only one for miles, beating

like a caged bird
seeking freedom
or, perhaps, the life it had just minutes before

shortly after i identified the body
the coroner told me
it took him at least 48 hours to die
at this, everyone thought of nightfall and sunrise
repeating through
eyelids and eyelashes and
broken glass and warped steel
all coated in red
and i wondered
what kind of school teaches you how to measure
the length of someone’s misery

what do you want to get out of this
my therapist asked me on our first session

his pen touched the paper
like a coma victim’s lifeline on an ekg
the peak of words infinitesimal amongst a background
of nothing

birds chirped outside like a heart monitor
bee-beep, bee-beep, bee-beep,
bittersweet, feint, until a steady stream of sound
like weak alarm, like the ringing of my ears as a
pitch i would never hear again
said its goodbye

we sat, vis-a-via, waiting for the indiscernible
sounds of the hundreds of others who shared their
sorrows in secret in this same room,
sat in this same chair
weeping similar tears, fighting similar streams of
consciousness
mute, shattered, broken

Outside are trees that stick out of the earth like
veins run dry
Snowflakes fall like spider webs
Wisps of smoke travel slowly and stick to the weak
walls of my lungs
“Blow them out” someone says
But the fire keeps burning

bedtime story

i’m streaming pandora and, just as i type this, Kid A from Radiohead
comes on…i imagine these exact notes are what your feelings would
sound like if they could compose themselves into music,

like a lullaby thick with melancholy, dripping a dark kind of beauty

what am I thinking?
you ask me
i stare at your pale hands playing with something i can’t see.. i want
to touch your fingertips the way the paper you are playing with rubs
against your skin, over and over, until i am just a small secret held
in the palms of your hands.

Sometimes there is so much space between two people. Sometimes there
are too many eyes, too many moods, too many faces
and sometimes you are all i see. your arctic eyes, the stage for a
playground of pain, remind me of so many things, even myself, though i
do not know you
though the only certainty is that i want to

when night falls like an anchor, i want to be a visitor in your bed,
to wrap around you as soft as eyelashes, to gather you into the cocoon
of my arms and pull at the loose threads of your thoughts until we
both fall apart, warm, dreaming.

quiero conocerle

nothing ever came from wanting
to know someone this much
all prologues that begin this way
end in despair
this will be no different

I wanted to know him
Know the sound of his voice, the curve of his palms
Run my hands along his lifelines
Leave my fingerprint on his future

I wanted to know the weight of his embrace
Pressed against my ribs,
His arms a lasso around my lungs
I wanted to feel the heat of his breaths,
Along the slope of my neck,
His fingers playing the tired rings of my spine
Like piano keys
I wanted to count the steps between
My front door and his
Know how many I would need
To start this life all over
After he would leave mine

It is true that I looked for him
His silhouette still haunting every memory
The stranger, taking the shape of so many dreams
I called out his name like a prayer
Spelled out letters on my lips,
Rolled the syllables over many times in secret, hummed the vowels
Like sustenance, like divinity
Like a sacrifice placed in the palms of my hands
How I wanted to hold his
How I wanted him to know me too

Would it come to be
That the dark of his eyes would permit
The reflection of my own in them
Would he come to me
For conversation, for comfort
From now until our old minds
Forgot every familiar face
Would he think of mine during heavy evenings where
In between sea and sky, was the world we alone belonged to

Would he understand my need to know him
Me, a brute animal,
a starved addict

How much time went by, wasted, hunting for his features in other faces
Scouring the sidewalks for his steps
His face in the reflection of invisible rooms,
Under the canopy of so many lost chances
Every place now empty, austere
Because I lost him, like so many,
With the grotesquery of my affection,
But
The desire does not die,
Nor does my wanting to know you
Only I do, poco a poco
little by little

scraps

“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness”

I could have been any number of things. I could have been something. Bad choices, unfavorable circumstances, those two bastards, claimed what could have been a beautiful life. At least, that’s what I lie and tell myself. Lighting up one more cigarette, watching planes take off for the first time outside my window, I feel my throat close in when the smoke filters its way into my mouth. A rejection. I want to cough. I want to know what this is. But I keep going, hacking, squinting, pretending I can go on like this forever.

I wave as the plane ascends above the perimeter of 6 story buildings, en route to vacation spots more exotic than the bowels of Queens, than this neighborhood where people pray words they hardly mean so a God that’s deaf to everyone can remember them when they take that final flight to a heaven that doesn’t exist.

A boy on the train today averted my eyes when mine met his coincidentally. This is how I know that I am old, well, aside from other men telling me that I am. Lingering glances and protracted stares have evolved into avoidance.

When the boy-20 something, trendy and lean-turned his face, I noticed long unbroken scars from his lips to his ear. They looked new.

I wanted to touch them. I wanted to know how they happened.

Not much stays with us until the end. Those will. They will appear in wedding photos and raise the wrong type of questions during interviews. Despite what he is wearing, what age he is, this will be the first thing to introduce itself and the story of how will be the most repeated in his lifetime.

People who live in the apartment complexes in front of my own have set up chairs and a playset in the alley between the two tall buildings. A shadow projects a pall over one old woman seated by herself, rubbing the growing mass on her left leg. I remember when it was just a discoloration, a small nothing, a bead trapped under otherwise smooth unblemished skin. Now the mass is the width of her normal leg and she ignores how it has impeded her life, how deep those veins run, like purple subway lines along places where the pain started and where it does not end, how she treads the limb along when she walks like it’s a burden to her body. She hasn’t gotten it checked. No need. It’s her secret. We all lie to ourselves. She thinks, “Maybe it isn’t cancer or disease. Maybe it’s just bad luck.”

A slender foreign man hands me change and a bag for my 10 dollar bill and single bottle of beer. He rises from his seat behind the counter where rows of products are mounted against the wall. Every item and their imminent expiration are tattooed to memory. This is the knowledge that has replaced years at university, he says. If the mind were like a glass that could only hold so much liquid, he poured out Cabernet and refilled it with cola. A doctor in Delhi or a clerk in Kew Gardens. We only have so many choices. It was worth it, he tells me, pointing to the photos of his children taped along a plastic case for candy. In the pictures they are 3 years old or so and happy, huddled around their father’s long legs. Now they are 30 or so and entrepreneurs, and largely absent from his life. “Business keeps them busy” he says, picturing the future he envisioned and the one he has. The bell over the door rings to signal another customer. He checks for familiar faces as he always does, listening for the sound of “Father” instead of “sir.” Closing time will come soon, signaling one more day like the one before, one more day without them.

My heart races a little faster at nightfall and I check my pulse for signs of something wrong. There’s no one around to tell me to calm down. I debate my own foolishness with myself. I never looked for that vital beat inside, now it’s all I seek. I make a silent wish for just one more day, even if it’s as unremarkable as this one. It’s been 32 hours since I last said something to anyone. The drum my of heart is the only thing that speaks. Just before I drift off to sleep, I hear that grateful beat whisper from within: thank-you, thank-you, thank-you.

dirty little things

Mother was making breakfast and smiling this morning, or, at least, I thought she was smiling. From the side, the corners of her eyes were starbursts and her mouth was open wide. I half expected to see her laughing, the other half, happy. Instead my mother turned, not knowing I was there, and into the bowl of pancake batter in her hands I saw heavy red drops fall from her lips. One more tooth, one of the few she had left, had fallen out. When my mother smiles, you only see teeth at either end of her lips. Now, you only see one on the right side, the other is a slow-dripping faucet of red and disappointment. The way she looks now doesn’t change much but the tooth is one more reason she feels less like a woman, less human even. She’s 29 and half of her teeth are gone. She has no insurance and there’s not enough money for a dental cleaning, let alone dentures. With tears streaming down her face she keeps stirring. Red swirls surface in the beige batter until the whole thing becomes pink. She closes her mouth and her lips sink in. She looks older than she is, angrier than she is. She puts the bowl down and goes into her room, locks the door, opens the window overlooking the river. I know this because a strong breeze escapes from underneath the door. I hear the whistles and howls from the water as it’s pushed hard towards the south by winds that hit the body like a fist. I know what she is thinking. She is thinking of jumping out, or jumping into the river. I know this because she tells me. Often. My mother grew up in the Caribbean but never saw the beach. Here, in the slums of the country’s most accomplished city, is where she sees waves right from her window, blurred by a crosshatch of steel bars. I wouldn’t see a real beach either until I was 13, and even then I wouldn’t see what the big deal was -the burning sun, the scorching sand, water that kept going until it met the yellow of the landscape and so hazy far off in the distance, under all that heat, it quivered like a mirage on the verge of disappearing once you blinked. Together the ocean and sky were blocks of mismatched colors with not much going except for an interruption from a slender, hungry bird flying from one end of my view to the other, looking for and not finding what it wanted. Up until that morning, however the river outside that window was the only body of water we had ever seen in our lives and from up close it was a corrugation of brown liquid and trash. My mother loved it. During the blackest of nights the river danced with the reflection of lights atop the twin bridges. She mistook the twinkling yellow in the river for stars in the sky and because she was my mother, I’d agree with her and hoped, for her sake, that all the wishes she made upon them came true.

On a bed caked with dreams come undone lies my mother. The curtains fly violently in her room.  There are spots on them marked with blood where they touched her weeping, bleeding face. I stick my 7 year old fingers underneath the door but she doesn’t touch them or let me in. A breeze that feels like ice cools my fingers and I slip them out from under the door. I go into the kitchen and eat from a box of cereal, saving all the colored marshmallows as for an offering to the forlorn looking Jesus on a funeral card standing amongst family photos. I line the marshmallows up in front of him in exchange for just one tooth. I pray to him the way one prays when dropping coins into a fountain or when rubbing the bulbous center of a ceramic Buddha. My father opens the door as I being to pray. He looks a few pounds lighter from when I last saw him, his face a little more pale. A box of Marlboro lights is still on the sofa where he last left them 3 days ago and he takes one, lights it, lets the burning cone of ash forming at the end fall onto the ashtray like snow, like something beautiful. I take a crayon and put it to my lips, make the same movements that he makes. He pats my head but I can’t feel it because when I’m with him I live inside the memory, not inside the moment. I record my life with him the way an archaeologist records notes, jotting down minor details about an artifact upon first discovery and then stores them to be observed and understood later. In the case of the archaeologist, he has the object at his disposal whereas I only have the pieces of broken bitter memory.

My father is a living ghost and for this, my love for him is painful. I know he will vanish at any time and I know he has only come home to gather the few things he needs before vanishing again, either being forced out or running away all on his own.

He says something to me but I don’t hear it. I play with my round tummy and pretend my bellybutton is an eye that sees everything from waist-level. He picks me up and puts me over his shoulder. He walks over to the locked bedroom and assumes my mother is mad at him again. He smells like smoke, like a man that’s been set on fire. His hair is soft and his breaths come quickly. They echo in the hallway as he waits for her to open the door. He puts me in his arms and when she doesn’t come, he lets go. I follow him back into the living room where he gives me a snow globe. Inside it is a brunette ballerina which moves in circles when I wind up the key. In slow swirls she moves to Mozart’s Andanate. My father asks for me to dance for him the way the ballerina dances for me but I refuse. I know better than to try something I’m not good at. Even though he’d love me anyway. In his own way.

The ballerina twirled and what was a beautiful movement at first became a tornado of confusion, like an attempt to escape her illusive world. The pretty little ballerina with the pink bow and pink shoes didn’t know how to get out and around-and-around she went, looking upwards, waiting to be saved from behind impenetrable barriers, from her monotonous dance that made me dizzy and sad to keep watching. I wanted someone to save her. I wanted my mother to have everything she desired,for the little she had to stop falling apart and for my father to find what he needed within these walls, instead of the outside where I couldn’t find him. The music stopped and the ballerina was facing me. Her face was my face and the globe I lived inside was an ocean of my mother’s blood and tears, the notes my father’s failures.

hunger

On a drive upstate I pass bloated, sad cattle staring at the open road, disappointed with their diet, nothing that goes into them is their choice. Everything is controlled so that they’ll get to the right porportions suitable for slaughter. Except they don’t know it yet. Maybe the question flints in their small minds. Wondering how an escape might be possible. How far does the long strip of black travel. On the other side, are there other animals miserable, just like they are, or are they the unlucky ones. How sad that is. To think you’re being taken care of even though where you sleep isn’t up to you, nor is what goes into your own body, or what becomes of your children. But it’s only for a little while. Till they say youre ready. Till it’s time to pass on and into someone else.

I wonder if all motivation stems from hunger. I think of how food is used for training children and animals and if none of them had an appetite would they still stick around? Would they listen? Would there be any love?

Maybe everything stems from a dependency. For food, to feel good. Maybe that’s all there is to life. Maybe heaven isn’t heaven afterall. Without the need to eat, shit, work, worry, what is there? What’s the need for someone else when you don’t need anything to make you happy. Maybe this is heaven. The pain, the hurt. Because there’s something to fix it. Because eventually it will be over.

Back home, I shake a bag of cat food and the cat comes running. When he rubs his furry body against my pale hairless leg, I feed him and he purrs. I confuse this for affection. The ground up fish reeks on my fingertips and his little face expresses  so much pleasure and together we sit contented. I look into his squinted yellow eyes and wonder what other feelings have I ignored because if he was capable of affection, contentedness, certainly he is capable of feeling betrayal. Does he ever think back to his first days on earth, think of his  mother and siblings. Did he suffer the days after without them? Does he think of the life he had then? When he cries sometimes is it his way of asking me where they are? Does he reel from the frustration of my not being able to understand him? Maybe his meows are his way of asking why. Isn’t that the question we’re all asking all of our lives? A pang of guilt his me and I reach into the bag to feed my little orphan a little more and he paws my ankle until he collapses at my side, full and a rush of complacency and power feeds me because an act so simple brought him so much joy. And this I gave to him. This food is my gift for him. His gift to me is an undeserved love.

on getting what you want

it happens like this. you wait years for a sign and when it doesn’t come, you resign for those nocturnal messages, dreams where forgiveness can be asked and all those memories that should have happened, happen while the mind invents them.

And out of nothing you appear, young again.  Voice a little less hoarse. A few less cigarettes for your lungs. A few steps before your early expiration. We’re packing CDs into a box. How symbolic. And the moment comes where I finally ask the questions I’ve been meaning to ask all this time.

What was it you dreamed of when there will still dreams to be had, when your world seemed limitless, when fantasy still seemed feasible? And, despite my lifetime of indifference, would it possible for you to forgive all my misdeeds, even after you had finally come around to asking forgiveness for your own, and i didn’t accept them?

And then the light came like a surreal movie scene, like heaven depicted on so many screens, and then the embrace and the word that was hardest for me to say, dad.

And I woke up, with the wish fulfilled, having said what I needed to for so long and then, then came the darkness, the darkness of morning and of reality that the moment that was an subconscious fabrication and the reality that “you” are not you but a man that Once was. And I apologize again to the memory, to myself for holding on to the impossible for so long.

I have a lifetime of words for you and I’ll never get to say them. Instead I sit with the tears slowly dripping from a single eye, the pain closing in my throat like two hands choking me.

My father is not a man but a small mound of ashes in wooden box, all burned out like the cigarettes he used to smoke.  Your impression on those living is just as ethereal, and, for most, just as easily disposed of. Aside from this dream and this box with remains of a man no one else remembers, that’s all there is to it.