Last night I was inspired, so I wrote 4 poems. Here they are:
LOOKING AT A PICTURE OF MY FATHER
He is young. He is wearing black, plastic-framed glasses and a military uniform.
He is the color of sand
In the small sepia rectangle, and not the glistening, tamarind-brown man I know,
Darkened by shame and regret and years driving sailors and drunkards
And businessmen with hollow bones like birds in his taxicab.
I smell the soap we used to wash his car on Sundays and Wednesdays. I feel
The automotive polish caked beneath my 8 year-old
Fingernails.
I taste the sorrow he plays on his trumpet, Chet Baker and Art Blakey. I hear
Celia Cruz trill “AZUCARRRR!!!”on the radio as we sail in his great ship, the Cruising White Cadillac, windows down on our way to a Saturday afternoon game of chess at the park
That he will let me win.
Looking at a picture of my father, I see a 24 year old Filipino in a war zone not
Terribly far from the ancestral Mother land with blurry Spanish tongues and Catholic
Lip service and in the South; Muslim hearts and history written with balisong that he has never visited.
Looking at a picture of my Father, I see myself.
RECONCILLIATION
His voice is different, my brother Matthew.
He’s picked up the high-pitched nasal twang of Hilo since we’ve last spoken, many years ago. My niece is in school now, he tells me.
His voice is different, my brother Matthew.
He’s picked up the sigh of resignation to a life of calloused hands as a heavy-equipment
Operator, pouring concrete, his brilliant engineer mind, for carpetbaggers apportioning parcels of the sacred Hawaiian Kingdom wrested from loving storytelling hands 200 years ago by alleged friends.
He’d gotten in a car accident, the last minute a vision of our dead Grandmother telling him to slow down, there is a hillside ahead, he tells me. He also tells me how the firemen that pulled him unscathed from the twisted carcass of Japanese aluminum and so much broken glass, they say he should not be alive.
His voice is different, my brother Matthew.
He’s left behind the gangbanging that seemed to steal his hope for a future,
And with it the tattoos he wears like mirrored maps that show where he has been, and with it, the guns and knives, and the simmering fear that he will kill me in my sleep if I ask too many questions.
His voice is different, my brother Matthew, because he has become a man.
OATH
I swear to speak of injustice always.
I swear to let my words stand as defiant proud gleaming pillars in the slums we are resigned to.
I swear to write songs full of accusing questions and checks and balances
which I will scream with drum machines and hissing blooping computers and sequenced heavy metal guitars at dive bars and birthday parties.
I swear to weaponize sex and laughter, because we are beautiful, and we know the score, and we are all we have, we circle of brave Sisters and Brothers the World calls poets.
For an Owl
In moving to Texas from Nevada
I have left behind the
Small Owl that visited me
at night.
I had seen him, unafraid of
Me, 2 feet away perched on
a water fountain, knowing me.
In the 3 a.m. dewy grass,
refusing to squint, bathed in the
artificial nuclear sunrise of my headlights.
On my toolbox at work,
Reminding me that I neither own
the tools nor control the means
of production, but it be below me to let this
anarcho-socialist ideal keep
me from excelling in my
craftsmanship. My Grandmother
would call you ‘Spirit Animal”,
but I will call you Tiare,
after my friend who would ask profound
questions with her wet eyes about my stupid,
half-cocked teenaged ideas that I did
not have answers for, who has given
me mannerisms and cynicism and
Is the only person to have ever
lovingly called me faggot.
