Out of bounds

Because he was forbidden she
could not help but to wickedly
take in the jaw line, the steady gaze,
the strut, the wide shoulders,
the winning grin, the quietness
and turn it into an idol
for when one day she could find
another less off-limits.

Sunday

Sunday is your day
because you would wear
your nicest pair of jeans
and cleanest T-shirt
to give your soul to God,
whereas I slept in and ate cereal
in the bright emptiness
of the living room, waiting
to see your golden head
pop through the gate
a smile that would reflect the sun
spread across your face.

I am glad Sunday
is your day.
I had Saturday,
when pancakes and bacon
were the order of the morning
topped in whipped cream
and fruit, and when I could
feed my hunger for both
food and happiness
in the shared brunches
I had to learn not to miss
when I moved away.

And Monday was goodbye.
No one likes Monday anyway.

But I'll leave you a minute
on Sunday -
a minute to smile
at the memory
of a golden head
bouncing through the gate
with the smile of a miniature sun.

If I Would You

If I ran for you
would you count
the beads of sweat
dropping, if you could,
in your open palm,
to remind you
of how much I ran
and how hard?

Would you harvest
its salt and pool that
with what I lost in tears?
Would you listen
to the surplus heartbeat
pushing its way
through a rib cage
strained in its breaths
to keep the dizziness
in, the air from exploding?

And if I stood for you
hours in a crowded airport
swimming through faces
to find yours,
would you pick me up
in a second to take
the soreness and
pour it all out?

I sometimes dream for you
knowing full well that
my tossing and turning
will never be caught gently
or soothed to forgetfulness,
yet still my body
refuses to give up
remnants of things
it used to give you.

i would have liked to say i knew better. that the bubbling hurt just below the heart was just a momentary foolishness of a bodily reaction. but my body knows better than i ever will. and if insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting different results, then what is doing the same thing repeatedly, knowing the same results happen, and yet doing it anyway? ignorance, stupidity, or is it what they call hope? i handle memories like a hot potato dancing from one hand to the next, refusing to put them down and risking the burn because i hope the temperature will be, at some point, cool enough to hold onto tightly. i wished i could put down memories like i would a potato. instead, they become my best friends and worst enemies, filling me with such sad happiness that all i want to do is sit under running water, hoping the sad will wash away and leave happiness. i fear the dreams that bring me good times that are no more, because waking and getting out of bed becomes that more difficult. i rely on the voice of my better judgment to dig me out of my holes, or at least call me to let me know the surface and sunshine are not so far away. but like i said, i wish i knew better. i can never know better. i know fuller, i know deeper. i know stronger, with the passing of each day, that i am much closer to the person i am meant to be.

The Hard Way

I have learned the hard way sometimes
because the easy way wasn't good enough
to make an impression, and because this way
I know what exactly I can or can't do
and why.

You might think that I had learned to stop
dreaming about things that give false hope
and make waking so difficult, as gasping for air
is when too long underwater,
but it seems to be the only thing that self-control
cannot touch or hold back,
My mind's nocturnal explosions of longing
unraveling into the first minutes of dawn,
spilled pale orange on the covers.

I drew my sadness out last time wires and wireless
failed me, the physical problems just another way
for the unspeakable to merit a free piggyback into the world
riding in vengeful, burning anger down cheeks,
and I am astounded when I rub them away that
there aren't tracks cut into the flesh.

And still I will go on learning the hard way
because easy is meant for those who do not dare
to dare a little farther and longer than is meant.

Bahasa sehari

Aku menganggap pulang sebagai
suatu pengakuan:
tertinggal teman
terbaik sendiri.

Kalau kamu ingin berbicara
mungkin bisa satu detik
aku dan kamu saling mengerti
tetapi sedetik setelah
bahasa kita hanya kata
dalam aliran biasa sehari-hari.

Jangan berpandang ke tepi
jika ada sedikitpun harapan
berbagi.

World Travelling

The thing I think about moving
always moving, is that
nothing can catch up,
and no one does, except
months of waiting
to be found and cared about
that slowly drain a body into feeling
that the only hands that will ever
want to trace the perimeter of your lips
are your own because
they are too rough,
too bruised,
to lined with fear
to be desired
by someone else.

In Memory: Father's Day

I have enough trouble
as it is
owning up to what I feel
too ashamed
to share.

If owning up to it
means thinking
that all is forgiven
and hard-heartedness
has melted away
then you are wrong.

And maybe it's just
youth's pride
speaking through me
but I refuse to let you
know how badly I feel
for not being able
to take the accepting route
and fold away pasts.  

Cobbled bits of juvenile senility

Awkward, bespectacled, with more of a real crush
on Hamlet and his all-too-angsty worldly wisdom
than any real flesh-and-blood boy.

My parents never worried about what I'd be up to on weekends,
never wondered whether or not I was doing well in school.
It was a granted: I was the nerdy child, the socially uncomfortable one,
the one who never swore and never broke a rule and never pissed off
anyone.

Afraid of being too comfortable in what I was good at.
Too modest to believe in my own abilities sometimes.
Loving language and the many ways writers bent the letters
to their meanings, playing with words like they were soap bubbles;
so easily created, so quick to drift off into the world.

I cheered on underdogs like Harry Potter
and felt for outcasts like Dustfinger,
I understood Meursault's confusion and longed to
stand before his jury to make his claim for him.
Well.
The world of fantasy was more than just a passion;
it was my home, and I loved the stories in books
and got to know their characters better
than I did my own peers.

I memorized Macbeth's soliloquy hoping for tomorrow
a better tomorrow, and a better tomorrow
and finished reading Lord of the Rings
just so I could go see it in theatres.
I wanted to slap Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth silly
and shove Lydia off a cliff.
I lived vicariously through Jo's escapades and Anne's stubbornness,
and locked myself in my room to write and write and write -
or occasionally, rage over trigonometry I never quite understood.

In grade 10 I discovered Coldplay and marvelled at how
a song about the colour of piss could be so terribly touching.
A Rush of Blood to the Head, Parachutes, X&Y,
I played them as if they were the anthem to my high school days.

High school creeps up on me as if it were yesterday
and I feel a strange affection for the naive little girl
in mismatched clothing who wanted nothing more
than to date Hamlet and just maybe
meet a hobbit who also knew Dobby
and would let me take a holiday
if only I could find Platform 9 3/4.

Home for a Hybrid

Hull out a little snow
scuffle the Rockies with a toe
to find purchase and set to soil
your own tentative roots;
I held you up as motherland
because I bore your name
across airport gates, humbled
as visitor, foreigner, in lands
that maple leaves dare not grow.

I grew up on gingered-cardamomed-
palm-oiled-coconut-milked-bay-leaved rice
and took in more water than air with each breathful
but somehow turned out so Western on the inside
even as Calgary suns baked my pigmented layers
into cocoa-beaned skin of the East.

You will find home here,
a thousand times over,
in the uncharted boldness of allowance
to show exactly how middle class you are.
Even as I donned my personality
I knew that back East, back Jakarta,
back down, back off, back humble,
backed by contrast that comes
from so many ragged ruined on street corners
who could barely afford your worn sneakers
let alone put themselves in your shoes,
metaphorically. The literal almost always
wins out.

And here I am literally not foreign.
I look the blend that I am with Hispanic uncertainty -
despite lack of Hispanic blood -
I could be from anywhere.
And that is why, here in Canada,
I feel the weather right enough
to plant my seed, hitherto stored
protectively away in a shell of
not knowing what belonging
really means.

Much wine and less love

Too tired to turn the tide of a pastel bitterness
rising between the calm mute but not muted beauty
on an island fallen in the between spot of freedom and acceptance.

I leave no mark traced here but one that collectively blurs
what it means to have a footprint. This place I so lovingly fear
for what it does to my mind in moments stopped, unknown to others.

And suddenly a hankering for a drug that does not take,
but give, knowing there are none to speak of. But I will continue
to hope for the day that sweet stupid forgetfulness graces my aching head.

Forward onward

It is time to let it go.

Time to let the last argument drop

and time to close the door.

Time to not question why or how

or what might have come before.

It does no good, no salve, no heart

a cure, to have it go on and on 

because there is no time to waste

and even to its importance it still

does not warrant the kind of hashed,

worn opposition. 

Learn to agree to love

the times that were good and 

cry as many times as needed to

flush out the bad

and then move on to make more

because there can be a second go-

around if you let it free. 

And don't turn around hoping

that something beaten to death

long ago will come back to life 

because it will never be the same.

13 lines

I will err on the side of caution, for
it is easier to be forgotten and lonely
than it is to be known and hated,
and I would rather have you look over
me, melt my skin into the colours of background
noise, than have you cut me into strips
of judged personhood.

And I would rather have you look the other
way than give me the time of day to point
out all my flaws and cracks - I know where
they are and why they have come to be -
I don't need you telling me
what I am, I know it quite perfectly.

Good Night Thoughts

Still-seeming are days filled with longing
for things remembered and so long ago
but there will be many more, I tell myself
not to worry, that on the pillows
of future beds there will be warmth
and once more a beating heart to set
the rhythm of my sleeping breath,
gentle dimples holding the love of
hundreds of smiles.

In-between beats

This day dawns darkly and sad I sit
remembered touches flitting through mind
and chafed remains of fiery kisses laid light
on lips that have forgotten their purpose, thinking
that consonants carry conclusions fit for their existence.
No.
I wish it were not so, that tips of tentative fingers
lie still in ruthless rest from gentle gestures of affection
and that soft eyes brimming with the caresses of worn practice
fall sternly or dash away in panicked escape from gazes
too much to be friendly, too less to be love.
But
the taking of moments for posterity and shredded records
thread through thin time and its slow drip into later, perhaps
later
Never quite
becoming
now.

Dance

Because the days before you die are numbered
and will come to an end, then you must
Dance
in spare moments when you can.

Even if there is a heaven we've not been promised
the luxury of corporeal bodies, legs
to bear us fleet-footed over floors so
Dance.

And even if heaven did allow, by some miracle,
for us to keep our bodies and legs
the days spent growing old
and things like arthritis and stiffness
will come before you realize it if you don't
Dance
when you are young and breathe
the smell of sweaty people in.

Dance -
I make no case that is not fueled by
the incessant need
to move to rhythm of air
vibrating against soul.

Chris & Gwenyth

And they will hold it together
through strings of internet thread
and keep a front of solidarity
in bold font, print headline
but
behind folded shades and crumpled sheets
she will curl into a ball of hurt and
he will lie on a cold floor
each trying to feel the getaway
and past-it resignation,
the hope that one day
they will feel warm in bare skin
pushed up against loss.

Joy tripping

Just when the hope of little drops a little closer to none
that's when I do it: yank out credit cards and madly click
until, for some befuddled reason, I have booked a room
in a different city
away from here
with hardly a clue
of what to do
when I get there.

This is the way I like to tell myself that hells yes I can
and that fuck no I don't belong to anyone, no one's shove around
pet that obeys and listens to reason because those days are over
and yes I'll wander
and yes I'll get lost
and yes I'll eat a damn
cheeseburger and lick my goddamn fingers.

I will take out my camera phone and capture the most banal of buildings,
the most unworthy of picturesque touristy unpicturesqueness
and post it proudly on Facebook for all to see that THERE! I did it and went
and came back
a little broke but
proud of the miles
and the thoughts
running through
a lonely tourist's head when they turn and realize that the person they want to say LOOK! to
isn't there.

Things

The things that keep the stars in place
and gravity downward
those that keep birds singing
instead of barking
and those little things
that make flowers open
on warm spring days -

These are the things
holding my mind
and pumping my blood
and longing for things
that make the other things
make sense.

Only in Vancouver

Only in Vancouver
do we get away with
Canadian "Winter"
that feels like a Manitoba spring
and an Alberta fall.

The days may
be pastel gray
and wipe the colour of the sky
to the colour of grey goose feathers
smudged in oil pastel blobs,
but I find I quite like
the gentleness of midday
screened in cloud.

And only here do people
take their umbrellas
to shelter from the flying drops
of snow
that touch
the ground and seep
into roots, keeping green
the grass.

I love the sea salt air
blowing and raining,
the drips
that gently soothe
my tired ears
to sleep.

On those days

When my days hand me uphills and stumbles
when my nights shake me awake at 2am
and when ticking time refuses to wait,
I look as far as eyes can reach
along the line of the shore, the mountains,
and out to the people walking against the wind,
each step taken in the belief that forward
is worth the struggle.

There might come a day when it is not enough;
when hard is hard no matter how you push at it,
mold it, try to find a way around it,
every moment feeling like the mental is the physical
and vice versa, not mattering whether
it was a metaphorical or real door
that was slammed in your face,
because the gust of rejection and the bang of finality
feel the same either way.

And on these days I want you to remember
that your slammed door is someone else's crumbling home
that your scraped knee is someone else's crippled life
that your tears are someone else's tsunami
and that all will move on, forward, as it always does -
and that so much feels better with someone there
to pull you onward, push you past immobility
and into tomorrow.

Filling spaces

The day I meet the certainty
of a future laced with peace
is the day I will put my feet to ground
in the satisfaction of knowing that roots
will grow if they are given half the chance
and two drops of hope.

I left too many houses to know
what it might have been like to have a home
and there were too many empty spaces
of things my parents couldn't fill
to feel like I was raised to the end
of childhood rather than
adopting adulthood long
before knowing what it was.

Perhaps that calm that was having you
around to talk to was when
my faith in lasting things broke
like glass blown too thin
and gently squeezed
to shards of sand.

I didn't mean to fill the space
with grasping for what could not be -
but as always it seems to me
that empty-cornered hearts
were made for me
when people say "from the bottom of"
a bottomless breathlessness
that just needs a little patching,
a little love.

Dear world, I want to teach

Dear world,
I am tired.
I am tired of having to prove
that I am what I say I am.
I am tired of having to show
that I can do what I know I can do.
I am tired of jumping through stupid hoops
and climbing rickety ladders
without purpose.
This isn't my first rodeo,
or clown show, or circus.
I resent being put on display for evaluation
and I resent being compared to a list
that a group of collegial people festooned with degrees
designed for the sole purpose
to make this difficult.

I want to teach.
Is it not enough that I offer myself up
for the scrutiny of students?
Is it not enough that I go to classes
and do assignments that don't seem
to have much use for me in the end?
Please let me be.
Please let me do.
For two seconds of a miserable day,
I wish I could call myself a teacher
without needing that piece of paper
that tells me I can call myself thus.

Faith

Take the responsibility.
Have enough adult sense to know
that God didn't arrange your failure,
and that He doesn't have a plan
to yank you back out of that hole.

Get a grip on gods and deities
and see where they sit in you.
Use the knowledge that you are but
one cell in the body of the world,
your energy a part of everything
around you.

Faith is as real as you want it to be.
It is as powerful as you wield it.
It is as reassuring as you embrace it.

Something bigger than any of us
reaches its way outward like rays
from a sun that will never give up.

For those few

People in your life come and go
some more like tickets that get validated and left behind
some kind of like souvenirs from a long-lost land
and some that stick like lint in the static of the moment
and yet others that trail like the toilet paper stuck to your shoe.

But some choose to stay -
the umbrellas that keep you dry on rainy days
the comfortable old T-shirts that you can't do without
the warmth of sunlight, even in the middle of winter.

This is for those who stayed.
This is for those who didn't look the other way
when it was all you could do to keep your pieces together.
This is for those who cheered you across stages:
graduation, convocation -
teenage angst, quarter-life crises, love and loss -
and for those who had the time to sit in the silence
of your pain,
or say the right thing as you frayed into tangled strings
and confused nothings.

This is for those called friends.
Those who take the beginning
and carry it to the end.
They may, sometimes, come and go -
but spent a lot more time staying and believing and giving
that their goodbyes are more like see-you-laters
and their hellos more like I know you, I see you, you matter.
Those who don't just come
and go.
But also come back
and stay.

Non-religion

This is my non-religion
this is my heart
I believe its beats and rhythms
and trust that oxygen will be there
with the next breath
that the earth will be beneath my feet
when I walk to the coffee shop
that caffeine will continue
to thrum in its race down arteries
and that my voice can thank
as well as my eyes.

My non-religion loves
and feels
and takes in
and gives out.
It is just as your faith
strikes God into you;
mine brings god out
and shares it with everybody.

I may not touch my fingers to my temple
or my temple to the ground
but I do watch the pale purple sky spilled
over with sunset light
and open to the blurred softness
of awe in beauty and calm.

But most of all,
my non-religion
never seeks to convert you
or question you
or judge you
for the very same things
that make your soul feel fed.

I am full -
brimming with the tender acceptance
that is my non-religious core.

Rest aside

I dreamt and wished that I might
not have lived what I did that night.

When it all seems too true
only to wake and dawn that
what had made me so happy
is gone -
I bear it less well than when
something sad comes out of nothing.

You cannot wish for something
that you know nothing about
or miss something that never has been
and so, yes, I would rather,
sometimes, be ignorant of a beating heart
than feel it crush under steel cage ribs
and knowing brain.

If I could my dreams rest aside
and slip through thoughtless sleep,
I would learn to love those night time hours

not quite, not yet.

Winter rain

Let me sit and hear
the patter of soft winter drops on the pane -
they call it rain -
but to the senses so much more
and to the care I grow
to remember the warm days indoors
that constant drumming
in gentle rhythm between heart beats.

The days once more grow long -
yet still short-breathed,
seeming like yesterday I said goodnight.