counting cuts

Warm from the tinge of her skin

Colored with cracks of my scar

Tickles me cool

You can't hear the hurt

When it caws she slits

ghost tears

masked in sleepless desperation

Stale steady whisper

every scream ever so

Still

In the night of swallowed suffocation

The death inside her head

Is not dread

The fear you find is naught

her

haunting hands

Heavy grasp lay suspended

Vivid but numb

Kissed blades cry her away

Wonder why I

betray the living to live

In shattered feathers

Abandoned by faith

I trust

her no more. Trust

her silence

She is vapor I am smoke

Breathing burns, bleeding

hollow ashes

Unstable you say?

It's all in her head

Today she dies a little

Do you see tomorrow in my eyes?

Hold me a little longer

I might pretend I'm a little stronger

than her disguise

Inhale.  Hell.

help her.

white rose

I picked out a bundle of white roses today.  I usually have no particular sentiments towards flowers but somehow these were a kind that captures and mesmerizes you; I couldn't help my instantaneous affinity.  They are beautiful.  The petals are fragile, barely holding, but the way they glisten through the droplets, it succumbs you entirely.  The way they bend, sighing as if closing their eyes.   I held each stem, and felt a surge of sorrow swallow me.  I knew the roses were going to die very soon.  And I was afraid of their impending, inevitable death.  Afraid of losing, oddly losing something so trivial, something that isn't even mine to begin with.  Like the ten baht helium balloon I accidentally let go when I was a little less than ten, or the first car my mother owned, or the stray black cat waiting at my doorstep.  I shed tears for them as if they were my own kin.  As if I lost someone I dearly loved.  I grieve, mourn, and move on.  And I have no more emotional attachments thereafter.  None.  I still remember each memory vividly when I look back at my fondness and stupidity.  But you know what they say, life goes on.  Mortality is only ever so kind.  So you see my problem with these roses.  I want them to cling to life, I want to prolong their purity but they are already starting to stain from the suffocating grasp of the air.  They are tainted brown.  Their heads hang low, drooping down to the ground.  They dare not look me in the eye for they know very well how softly but suddenly forever can fall.

post Rome syndrome

Dear Caprece

I thought of you today as I passed the canal on my way home. 

It was early evening but  the sun had still managed to suffuse its rays pass the massive weight of humidity which hung suspended in the air, depressing down on me. I felt like I had an elephant on my back and I was ready to jump into the canal.

I was walking across the bridge when the skies suddenly turned dark.  Mind you, this was no Ponte Sisto.  Just a loose alignment of crisscrossed wooden planks.   I closed my eyes as a speck of rain fell on my forehead.  Soon the droplets turned heavy and huge, dampening into my t-shirt.  Thunder roared menacingly at me.  But I felt strangely nostalgic and took shelter under a tamarind tree, climbed up to pick out its fruit as I did when I was younger.  The ants from the tamarind tickled my arms so I flicked them off, let them scurry away from the rain.  They look just like the street vendors folding their fake merchandise as they packed and pulled plastic bags over their heads.  A vendor rolls his goods into one bundle and ties it across his chest.  He scampers into his tiny motor scooter and chugs off.  If only he had a Vespa.  A beggar is sitting on top of a sewage line across from me.  He watches the chaotic scene, laughs, showing his blackened gums and teeth from betel nut chewing, but the smile reaches his wrinkled rheumy eyes.

I sat on the wet grass, peeling the tamarind, watching the muddy waters of the canal move as fast as the Tiber, waiting for the rain to die down. 

Soon the clouds calmed, stopped leaking, leaving only a putrid odor of rain soaked garbage; the trailing stink of ‘tuk tuk’ exhausts, combined with cigarette fumes and a thin gossamer aroma of noodles.

The rain in Rome smells strangely like the rain here.  Oh how I miss you so.