Mushrooms, Splinters, and Thorns

Night Letters

Night Letters
.I.
How terrible to fear the darkness
when night opens old notebooks
in giddy intensity?

No doubt dismal dreams
spilling over wrinkled pillowcases
invite deeper examination of self
or an avalanche of denials.

Yet, Yours Truly here, possessing a pencil,
diminishes the white space on sheets
and calls it night’s poetry.

The pleasure, if any,
aside from complacency,
could be communication
with the thing inside
for I am my only real audience.


.II

I thought I saw a shooting star somewhere around where
the bears dipped down and a night bird sang
in tuneful confirmation of one fragmented moment
--I am not sure existed-- like the time when
one hot word after another left his lips
sounding like my name.

.III.
Once in a park, at night, we tangled as lovers,
unfurling certainty and brave flesh; although we
never knew what was needed to last a lifetime.

The naked branches of the winter trees
must have blessed us, then; because, forty years later,
our fingers’ shriveled tips still touch
as we sleep side by side like seeds
about to burst open with the full moon.

.IV.

I don’t care anymore when people protest when I make
a mistake. This is guaranteed: I’ll always make mistakes
and the protestors will come after me with their silence
or with their savage words, not knowing I now possess
the hush of a ghost, a night ghost, who doesn’t care
where she haunts.
See, I am determined to go through walls
with my back full of knives.

.V.

Why this hurt
-akin to night fears-
visits me so often?

So far away you are
in the next state,
and our no-more home
turns into a crate-like edifice
tacked down by the loss
of grown up children.

Broken off my stem,
we chased after them
through light years of distances,
without looking over
our shoulders;
even, while knowing
they’ll never be back.



“A moment that changed your life.”

I remember the red dissolving the edges of her eyes, as her gaze locked into mine. The tears swelled, trickling out on her cheeks, drifting on to her ebon dress; she wiped them with the scarf that covered her hair. When she opened her lips and spilled out her whiny words, my heart grew hard and thorny. I felt she was campaigning for my true involvement, but I resisted in disbelief, all kinds of suspicious things tossing and turning inside my head, cramming this moment into the vault of my mind for the safe keeping of one bulging fact she uttered. My grandmother was telling me of my father’s demise; of the bullets in his brain, not by other hands or by accident.

Family Feud (Maya's Poem - from a novel to be)

She appeared at the playground out of nowhere
just to see me --the mother of my father-- after he died,
not by accident. I remembered Nana telling me
to run away and hide from her, but there was nowhere to go.
So I played leap frog and jumped into her view, just like
a mistake that can’t be hidden, me being the mistake.
I was glad to have seen my grandmother
one last time,

but when this was found out,
Nana’s claws tore at my seven-year old body.
I still can’t understand, how she expected me
to vanish from view just like that.
And the feud continued all our lives.
When there was no Papa to fight over,
they resurrected me in his place to tear apart
like vultures fighting over a carcass.
But I was not a carcass.
They never saw that.