Losing Neruda on Flight 621

nimbus images pester
the periphery of a vision trained
to a faraway horizon
where gods intervene on God’s
intervention:

a questioned presence
serves an alibi’d past.

my cold-tortured ears
freeze

toward an abstract duplicate of my land
as i slowly lose my prose to dreamy skies
forsaken to ill-wills of angels of books
and soldiers of fortune.

Wrong!

.
when that which was conceived by the intimacy of twin souls


obstinately drifts along with the stream of birth,


what else should sensual waves rush to the heart for?


O, intolerant gods could only


welcome the word turning into flesh:


the newborn whose cries echo the truth of the wind:


when love is right, everything else is wrong.


Wrong!

The Poipet Dance

surfing through the moonroad
toward the Thai border
we dance to the beat 
of war of
war
unresolved to
this day 'til maybe tomorrow .

Aranyaphratet is where our poverty
should end
as we dance as we
dance to the Poipet beat
of war of
war
unresolved to the span
of a five-second asphalt
and days-length of disrepair.

the puppet dances the Poipet
dance captive to the beat
of war of
war 
unresolved to these words
long unused:
spoils go the victors' way.

Moment of Unknowing

"She wanted to be a rose, pressed between the pages
of someone else's story." -- Sarah Gorham, "Interim"

Bookmark

Entwined with you in a most ecstatic moment
I have not for a single breath had the faintest
thought of what you wanted to be in the soul of me,
for I never allowed you to be the night dances

my reckless youth had pursued.
You are not the sunrise that I missed in many
Aprils when twilights were angelus lips
to green mangoes that turn yellow in sacred haste.

I refuse that you be the muse who bequeathed
to me hallowed prayers I chant in hopeless hums,
I'd rather you be the song celebrating the partisans
of death, bidding one farewell after sweet farewells.

You are not the colored moon on whose beam I died,
when I, as a frightened child,
Brahms' Overture tragically overran.
Cradle me instead in the peace of your breasts,

nourish me with soft touches of your lips
that I may be the blackest clouds to unleash
torrents of rains to bathe the morning flowers.
Caress my thoughts with love's silent hymns,

and fill me with verses that you,
my poetry, shall become my symphony.

<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Soul Intercourse

Carving a space between me and the moon
I clicked on a happy accident, stumbling upon
you, a proud pseudonym, a numbered name
highlighted against a stale background
of nouns unknown.
Cyber strangers we were.

Finding you I found me lurking at the edge
of crafted isolation, attempting yet to
link to your quietude that speaks riddles
of inverted pains.
We're comrades in verses.

Every utterance in fine accents of our past
reveals a book so contrived in angered art:
remembering a forgetting.
We're lovers on a long march.

Our thoughts needed no voice, our words often
the subterfuge of feelings overflowed in shared
moments we unknowingly catch us
strangers, comrades, lovers,

In compromising acts a la soul intercourse.