drowning


wishing for a haven of silence,
but wishing is futile since you never really mean it.
is she strange?
is she the one standing outside looking in?
walk to the left,
pull in a little closer.
you have become ostracized…
ostracized
their independence is terrifying.
it makes you squeamish,
it makes you a little nauseous…
conform
it’s so simple and yet she refuses
normalcy is a word that sounds akin to violence.
unnatural,
and yet everyone slips a little sometimes.
we all slip sometimes…right?
you look at her with fear emanating from your eyes.
the bravado is pointless,
when we are all trying to survive,

who is really surviving?

you smile along with the group.
do you love them---have they become your shelter?
the protection you wear around your chest.
protecting a heart,
you never took the time to develop.
will you wear their admiration around your waist,
like a suede belt that has become fashionable.
should you discard their affection
when the season has run its course

wait

do you hear the tears of a culture lost
in the sea of vanity?
in the mirrored pools of your own narcissism
you drown…

Miracles in Daylight Hours

The gun pulls in the shadows,
my heart keeps beating,
just a little too fast.
Blood flowing as it always does.
Don’t look up!
Please look down.
God, oh God.
Wet grass making a puzzle on my face
as I whisper, “Don’t kill him
kill me.” Bullet grazing my cheek,
hot oil making an imprint left forever.
Waiting in silence, whispering incantations,
silence.

broadway is dark tonight

missing my jeep.............

Chocolate Eyes

I remember your eyes.
The stories they told,
the shadows behind them.
Black pupils,
dark chocolate surrounding.
Red lines creeping along a black background.
Never stopping to close them.
You were afraid of missing the moment.
“The moment of what?” I would ask.
“You know. The moment,” you replied.
Those smiling eyes of yours.
They saw more than you ever told.
A couple of Nazis,
a president shot,
hippies screaming, “bloody murder!”
They never cried those chocolate eyes.
“Eyes are for seeing” you told me.
“Can’t waste them by washing the moment away.”
You never lost that moment,
the raging sea of moments.

Days passing, months gone,
your scent no longer near,
the indescribable scent of only you.
My heart will never heal.
Yet you keep walking higher,
higher,
the clouds are surrounding you.
I stand captured in a single moment,
licking the salt off of my wounds.
My blood rushing out, splattered
on a deck of cards. Easing a crimson stream
along the cold tile.
Your scent no longer near.

Untitled

Whisper senseless prose,
scream unabashedly
in my face. Tell me anything
more than “Hi, how are you?”
Redundancy is
what we fear
in our unaffected lives. You
whisper senseless prose? Can
I respond in absolute silence?

Simply Anh

He sat at a café across from the Eiffel Tower holding a cup of coffee in his hands, feeling the heat of the burning liquid trail down his throat and into his stomach. The crowd surrounding him was very quiet, as though the entire café was whispering secrets about him. He was not surprised since all of Paris seemed to be whispering around him, speaking in hushed tones about a man the height of a French woman, and with hair the color of the black licorice school children held in their hands. He had become accustomed to being separated from those around him; it was not possible to blend into a sea of people as it had once been when he lived in Vietnam. And yet he did not feel exposed, instead he felt secure in the knowledge of his separateness.
As he sat staring across at the park opposite he felt a shadow overtake his view. As he looked up he saw a woman in a blue dress and wide brimmed hat, her name was Eva and she towered over him as willow does in the presence of a daisy. “Are you sitting alone to give the impression of a scholar, or do you feel as confused those tourists across the street with their rainbow colored maps,” she asked him in French, expecting him to respond in kind. He looked up at her startled out of his own thoughts and responded in French, “I am simply enjoying the weather; since I have arrived in this city it has done nothing but rain. I have a suspicion that Paris does not like me very much.” She laughed at his response and fell into the chair sitting beside him. She watched him as he kept staring out at the park and she instantly felt drawn to him. She could not explain it; she thought that maybe it was because of his strange features. His tanned face was thick and weathered like a man of many years, and yet his eyes contained the spark that only youth will allow. “Do you smoke she asked,” pulling a cigarette case out of her attaché. “No,” he simply responded.
“Well, then I shall smoke for the both of us….”

Before leaving Paris, Eva had made him promise that he would never forget her. He told her that it would be impossible to ever forget her….she had become a part of him. It would be no easier to forget breathing. She cried when he said that and told him that she knew he was wrong, that one day he would forget to breath…but only for a moment, and once he took another gasp for air she would no longer be in his mind. She told him that it would not be so easy to forget the days that they spent together. And so she selfishly asked him to keep Wednesday for her and her only. She knew that as the days passed he would forget her blue dress, and the perfume that he said reminded him of the ocean. But she did not want him to ever forget the days that they had selfishly taken for each other during his six months in Paris. Of course he promised her Wednesday, telling her that he would not forget one single thing about her. Her eyes were sad as she nodded in agreement, knowing he was wrong.
But, Eva was right about time and its angry beating on our memory. As years passed he felt the memories slip away. Very slowly the small wonders that had made her so special to him began to fade into the mist of his mind. He could not remember if the blue on her dresses was an aqua like the sea or baby as the sky. And the perfume that she wore…he could not remember why he thought it smelled of the ocean, if it was simply because it was clean and fresh. These small, and seemingly insignificant memories kept fading away until one day when he was walking alone, his feet shuffling on the sidewalk in the suburban neighborhood in Sacramento that he now lived, and he felt his chest collapse for a moment, his reflex to breathe stopping in the middle of an intake of air. In that moment he felt her leave him, and he knew that she would never be back. Not in the way she had before. The image of her in his memory would no longer be strong and significant. Instead it would become a single memory of youth that an old man cherishes. And yet Wednesday always came and he knew that this would forever remain her day. Many years before this day he had given up smoking at his wife’s pleading for his health. And yet every Wednesday he woke before the rest of the house and he placed the beret on his head, hiding silver roots that now shot up from his head. He would open the lock box he kept in his closet and he would remove one cigarette. He would follow the same path along Stockton Blvd, the traffic noise around him closing together as nothing more than a soothing lull. He walked towards the Vietnamese restaurant and he lit his cigarette. He would not smell the nicotine surrounding him, nor would he smell the aroma of breakfast wafting from the café. Each Wednesday morning in front of the café, with a cigarette in hand, he smelled the ocean…and he smiled.