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.